


A Bird Unique

by what_alchemy



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Anal Sex, Gender Dysphoria, Genderfluid Character, Internalized Transphobia, No Fake Hickey AU, Oral Sex, Other, Period Typical Attitudes, Slower Onset of Scurvy AU, Trans Male Character, Vaginal Sex, discussion of previous pregnancy, epic trans origin stories, gender euphoria, hatesex to friends to lovers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-21
Updated: 2020-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:34:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 23,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27660749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/what_alchemy/pseuds/what_alchemy
Summary: James stumbles into love with Francis and meets himself along the way.
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames
Comments: 87
Kudos: 102
Collections: The Terror Bingo, Trans Terror Week





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I have been dreaming of writing this story for a long time! With Trans Terror Week coming up, I thought it would be a perfect occasion to write it. Time got away from me, but there are only ~~three~~ ~~five~~ six chapters to this fic and it will be complete soon.
> 
> This also fulfills my "The Dress" square for Terror Bingo.
> 
> The title refers to Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book XII, in which an aged Nestor relates the story of Caeneus, a warrior who was "born a woman" but resists marriage to any suitors before he is raped by Poseidon. Afterward, Poseidon offers to grant Caeneus any wish. Caeneus wishes never to suffer such pain and indignity again, and so wishes to become a man. Poseidon grants the wish and does him one better: he makes Caeneus almost (always almost, with the Greeks) invincible. While his skin cannot be penetrated by weapons, he is felled after a long, heroic warrior's life by the weight of many trees, and then he is transformed once again, this time into a golden bird who flies away and is never seen again. From the Brookes More translation of Metamorphoses: "Hail, glory of the Lapithaean race, their greatest hero, now a bird unique!"
> 
> Content notes where tagging won't do:
> 
> I've been affectionately calling this the "everyone is trans AU" on Twitter. In fact, only three people in this story are trans: Francis is a trans man, James is genderfluid, and Jopson is transmasc. I use he/him pronouns throughout for each of these characters, as well as plainly vulgar terms for body parts. There is sex (and frank conversation) in this story that does not shy from those body parts. Fair warning: James does not know Francis, or indeed he himself, is trans at the outset of this story. 
> 
> This story is very much about being trans, falling in love while trans, discovering one is not alone in being trans, realizing a happy trans life is possible, and navigating the slow revelation of one's own transhood. It is not, however, a story in which the characters are perfect Victorian/21st century examples of being woke. They are human, they make mistakes, they find ways to hurt each other. That would be true regardless of the configuration of their genders. While there are decidedly "unwoke" reactions to transness here, there is no disgust, no rejection, and no withholding of love based on anyone being trans. Nevertheless, please do not enter this story expecting anyone to be perfect versions of themselves. 
> 
> In light of that, please read with self-care in mind. I can assure you that despite the angst, especially in the first chapter, this is a happy story that centers trans joy, trans triumph, and trans love, but if you find any of it difficult, or don't think this is your vibe, no hard feelings for closing the tab.

Francis was making eyes at him again.

Francis didn’t make eyes like anyone else James had ever encountered. No calf-like mooning for Francis Crozier—no, Francis made eyes with as much disdain as desire. Francis made eyes as though his ardor could set the very Arctic aflame. Francis with his blood up could make a man feel at once like a towering edifice of manhood and the insect crushed beneath his boot. 

It drove James mad. 

Over the clack and scrape of flatware on plates, the din of laughter and conversation, Sir John’s paternal indulgence, and James’s own chatter, Francis made eyes at him. It was very distracting, and, other than a fleeting moment in which James met that hooded gaze with a silent promise, James had to ignore it entirely. His body, low beast that it was, wished to announce its excitement, clear _Terror_ ’s ward room, and bend Francis over the table without ceremony, but civilized conduct prevailed. 

Officers drained wine glasses and Jopson refilled them. James related a story and Francis sneered at him. Sir John spoke of his confidence that the thaw was just around the corner and Francis was the sole abstainer in the resulting chorus of “hear hear”s. Eventually, Sir John began to make noises about returning to _Erebus_ , and when he stood, so did the rest. As ever, it was down to James to contrive a way to stay on—Francis never gave an inch.

“If you’ll indulge me, Sir John, I must consult with Francis on the matter of my dip circle,” James said as the lieutenants began to file out. “I can walk back on my own when I’ve had my fill of his expertise.” He issued a very convincing chuckle, and did not have to glance Francis’s way to know the exact arc of the roll of his eyes. 

It _did_ rankle, that the Admiralty should give James the job of monitoring magnetic north, but it was Francis who received the functioning dip circle. So too did Francis’s put upon sighs when James actually did require help with the damned thing. 

“Is it giving you trouble again?” Sir John turned toward Francis with his chin and eyebrows raised. “Francis, do you believe James’s dip circle is beyond repair?” 

“Ah.” Francis cleared his throat. James bit the meat of his cheek to keep from laughing. “No. It merely has its foibles, as do we all. James must simply…learn how to romance it.”

It was everything in James’s power not to gape at the man. 

Sir John plastered a smile on his face and turned back to James. He clapped him on the shoulder with a big mitt of a hand.

“There you have it, James,” he said, and _winked_ , of all mortifying horrors. “Don’t forget to polish her and tell her she looks lovely.”

James made himself laugh again and said something agreeable and droll, no doubt. Sir John’s smile faded and he glanced back at Francis again.

“Perhaps your marines would be so kind as to lend James a rifle for the walk back, Francis?”

“Of course,” Francis said, standing straight and tall, hands linked behind his back. He neither slouched nor swayed, his words didn’t slur one into the next, and if there was a flush about his cheeks, it was no more than any of them had from the cool of the wardroom. Perhaps James would have him sober tonight—as sober as he ever got him. Heat unfurled low in James’s gut. 

“Wonderful,” said Sir John, and with one last smile, he strode from the wardroom. Francis’s gaze cut to James, and wordlessly he led them out. They met Jopson, who stood to the side waiting to clean up, but Francis leaned in and murmured into the boy’s ear, “The commander and I are not to be disturbed.” Jopson nodded serenely and gave James a polite smile as he passed. 

James had never known a steward whose sense of discretion wasn’t knit up tight as a sphinx’s arsehole, but still he burned at the thought that they were being obvious. But the heat of humiliation could not overtake the heat of anticipation. Like a good dog he followed Francis wordlessly to the captain’s quarters, but once there, he slammed the door and crowded Francis against it. Francis’s body was deliciously solid and he resisted James’s manhandling with his characteristic contempt, but they both knew it was for show. James snapped his hips against the lush expanse of Francis arse and growled into his ear.

“ _Romance the dip circle_ , Francis? A man might think you _want_ our venerable first to know how shamelessly you beg for my cock.”

“Are you going to give it to me or do you need to hear yourself yammer on for another half hour to get it up?”

James shoved him further into the bulkhead, mashing his face into the wood, but Francis only let out a low grunt and arched his arse back into James’s hardening prick. James scraped his teeth over Francis’s pulse point, and for his troubles he received a muffled shout, and Francis bucking back into him. James swelled to painful proportions, and with a flick of his wrist his prick was free of his flies and battering into the crevice of Francis’s arse.

“You should be so lucky,” James said, yanking Francis’s trousers down only enough to expose the thick mounds of his arse. A rough groan wrenched out of him as he seized those cheeks in both hands—as muscular as they were plush, crowned with freckles and dusted with soft, pale hair on the low curve. As ever, the sight, the sensation, the dark animal smell of it inspired James toward tenderness, but he knew well enough now not to indulge.

Over the course of the past half a year, James had been amused and chagrined to find congress with Francis had so many rules—not a one of them spoken aloud, each to be gleaned only by how closely Francis resembled an irascible cat when James unwittingly broke it. 

James was not to attempt to kiss Francis. James was not to offer to suck Francis. James was not to spread his own cheeks and present himself to Francis for fucking. James was not to grope about for Francis’s codger whilst buried deep inside Francis’s body. James was not to suggest a face-to-face assignation, or one conducted on _Erebus_. James was not to attempt to draw Francis’s trousers down past the meat of his cheeks. James was not to do anything but blast himself senseless into Francis’s arse whilst Francis quavered all around him and swore into whatever panel of wood against which he found himself smashed. James was especially not to behave as though he might be fond of Francis, and truly: he was not. Francis drove him mad with his sour moods and sharp, snide words. James was as vexed by the sly sweep of Francis’s eyes that indicated he wanted a good rogering as he was enflamed by it. 

He wanted to caress Francis’s arse, he wanted to kiss it and lick it and suck it, he wanted to slap it red and raw and then soothe Francis through the wreckage of his coming apart under James’s hands. He did none of these things. He did as Francis tacitly commanded: he scrabbled at the lamp above their heads to scoop some oil onto his fingers. Under the dizzying whirl of light, Francis grunted and growled and sank his teeth into his sleeve as James rooted for the tight furl of his arsehole. He caught the pad of his finger against the hot rim as Francis bore down against him, so eager for it. 

“Christ, do you ever make _haste_ , James?”

“Are you threatening to die of old age on my prick, _Francis?_ ” 

James twisted his finger as viciously as a stubborn screw into Francis’s hole, and was rewarded with a muffled shout. Francis’s arse was a greedy thing, grasping and sucking at James’s fingers, but despite how often they did this, he was still tight, still needed so much coaxing open. James put away all thoughts of doing so in some soft manner—in a bed, with the heat of kisses between them, Francis’s eyes wide and clear on his own, fluttering when James pleased him—and shoved in another finger. Francis rocked back against it and James’s fingers slid in deeper. Francis gasped and swore and squeezed his arse around the intrusion. He was smooth and hot inside, soft in a way Francis’s character never was, gripping James with all the greed of his desire. James hissed and set a swift rhythm to frig him open. Francis smacked a fist against the bulkheads.

James caught his wrist in one hand and pinned it to the wall.

“Are you _trying_ —” He curled his fingers and swirled them, pressing his knuckles into the sleeve of Francis’s arse until he nearly squealed. “—to get us _caught_ , you bloody beggar?”

Francis wrenched out of James’s grip only to reach behind him and seize James by the prick. James gasped and stumbled forward. Francis snubbed the head of James’s prick against his arsehole and bore down. Francis’s body bloomed around him, and they both drew sharp breaths as he sank to the hilt. 

“Nothing clever to say to that, hm?” James said, breathless. He pulled back only to slam back in. Francis spouted off invective but tilted his hips up for more. He slid a hand down his trousers to work himself; James gripped Francis’s hips to keep his own hands from wandering where they would. He snapped forward and set a swift rhythm. He cursed the low light; he should have liked to see the length of his prick disappearing into Francis’s body, the pink rim straining around his girth. He smothered the groan that threatened to give them away and surrendered to the push and pull of their fuck, the shocking heat of Francis’s body in all this swallowing cold. 

With a smack of his fist and a grunt that sounded very much like getting the breath punched out of him, Francis spent first, arse strangling James’s cock. James hauled his arse toward him to fuck him faster, harder, as Francis quaked around him and sagged into the wall. James’s rhythm stuttered and he slammed one final thrust deep inside. His rapture quivered on the precipice, eyes squeezed shut, face mashed into Francis’s hair, redolent with smoke and sweat. When his climax came, it felt like soaring, like bursting. In a haze of ecstacy, he pumped his pleasure into Francis’s body. 

The moments following their assignations were ones of peace, as if they were, together, floating in a boundless nothingness where no thoughts or feelings could bind them to the men they were—to themselves, to each other, to the expedition. That blissful time was always damnably short; inevitably Francis shoved James off of himself and snarled at him to go, James’s body already cooling where Francis bucked him off. 

Without sparing James a glance, Francis stumbled to his seat of ease. James tucked himself back into his trousers and shut the door behind him. In the corridor he leaned against the bulkheads with his eyes shut, willing the bones back into his legs, his back. 

When he regained his bearings, James would pass Jopson’s quarters on his way out and be helped into his slops. He would procure a rifle from one of _Terror’s_ marines. He would trudge the half mile back to _Erebus_ and think of Francis Crozier not at all. 

But for now he could sink into the languor of his release, the scent of Francis redolent on his skin—even the resounding emptiness of his dismissal. 

Sir John Franklin was toppled by a bear in a most ignoble fashion on 11th June, 1847. That night, James sought to obliterate his despair against Francis—a gale howling down a wall of stone. James fucked him because he couldn’t sob into his chest, yanked his hair because he wasn’t permitted to bestow gentle touch, hissed hateful words because Francis would never countenance soft ones. 

In the end, they rutted and rammed and raged against each other for nearly an hour, but neither reached oblivion. Francis signalled the end of their endeavor by thrusting back with far too much force, dislodging James from his body and causing him to trip over himself like a pup. James landed in a chair at Francis’s table. His trousers had pooled at his feet, and his prick hung damp and limp between his thighs. Had he ever been so pathetic?

Of course he had—a day like this, a soiled, deflated prick shriveling in the open air wasn’t even his lowest point. It would soon slip from his memory like dissolving gossamer, but for now he remembered: looking to Francis to _fix this, God, please do something, unmake this moment, Francis, please_ as he knelt before the ice hole into which Sir John had disappeared; weeping in the captain’s quarters on _Erebus_ as Francis said, _I feel it_ , eyes full of the fathomless compassion James both despised and longed for; crashing into Francis’s quarters hoping to find a man as needful as he, but finding only Francis—Francis sneering, Francis constant, Francis as he ever was. He supposed that was comforting, in its way.

James blinked back into the present and found Francis at his seat of ease, dabbing at himself with a grimace writ into his face. He looked up to find James staring, and scowled.

“Why are you still here?” he snarled.

“Have a bloody heart, Francis,” James said, burr in his throat.

“Turn around!”

“Christ.” James scoffed. “The things we’ve done to each other, and you’ll not let me _look_ at you.”

Nevertheless, James complied. He stood and pulled his trousers up. He eyed the door but could not face the walk back to _Erebus_ , could not pass the empty captain’s quarters aboard his own ship, could not bear to look upon his own berth with his sketches and his journal and his bloody _poetry_. He swallowed and took his seat again, his back to Francis, who was rustling and muttering and doing God only knew what to himself that needed so much damned privacy. James huffed and rearranged his legs. He’d not even made a mess of Francis’s arse.

James wanted to demand to know what he was doing back there. He wanted march over there and tell Francis _he_ would be doing the clean up, thank you very much sir. He wanted to demand that Francis sit beside him and not worry about how he looked and simply be, with him, just now. 

Ah—an obvious solution. James nearly laughed for how foolish he was in not thinking of it. He stood and made his way to Francis’s cabinet. He fussed with the crystal glasses and then pulled the stopper from the decanter. He heard Francis grunt as if in pique but he merely called out, “How many fingers, Francis?” and smirked to himself. 

He gave himself a generous splash and heard Francis shambling up behind him.

“Three,” he said, short. James schooled his face and poured Francis a glass. Their fingers brushed when he handed it over, but Francis did not linger. He plonked gracelessly into his customary seat and tucked his nose into the glass, eyes fluttering shut as if the scent of the whiskey could wipe away all his ills. James wished he could feel the same. He sat beside his new captain. His First. 

“To Sir John,” he said, and raised his glass. Francis met his eyes for the first time that night and touched his glass to James’s. That brow, quirked ever in judgement, seemed set at a gentler angle tonight.

“Sir John,” Francis croaked. James touched his lips to his whiskey just as Francis did. He watched Francis sip and savor even as the spirit burned smooth down his own throat. No heat stirred in his loins, but his damnable heart was another matter.

James had long given up telling himself Francis was an unbeautiful sort of man. One could insist that Francis was podgy and pockmarked, possessed of a thin lips and a rugged mein unsuited to the higher classes, a voice and accent that grated upon the ear, but the blood in James’s veins cared about none of that. It pumped inexorably in Francis’s direction; James’s eye was ever drawn to him when they shared the same space, his awareness bright and locked upon Francis always. There were times James found him almost unbearably handsome, and even dear. And, of course, stirring. James wanted, even now, to sweep the feather-soft hair from Francis’s brow, to cup his face and draw him towards himself, to take and give comfort in ways he knew were unwelcome. He balled his fists in his lap and turned away.

“Lieutenant Gore leaves during morning watch,” Francis said. 

James shook his head. He wanted to think as little as possible tonight; he especially wanted to avoid the thought of sending out his own lieutenant on a hopeless trek tantamount to an execution.

“You know my opinion on that, Francis,” he said. “I’ll not rehash our argument.”

“Oh, why not?” Francis said with a glint in his eye. “Because we’re having such a nice time?”

“I’d like to, for God’s sake,” James said. He swiped testily at his own hair and shifted in his seat, shaking his head. “More fool me, I suppose.”

“What would you speak of then, hmm?” Francis asked, tone infuriatingly light. “Perhaps the weather in England. I’ll give you a hint: it’s raining.”

“Francis.”

“Or how about a nice English garden? Perhaps Lady Jane taking a turn about that garden, unaware that her husband has been torn to shreds on a godforsaken tundra a thousand miles from home.”

“Enough!” James slammed his glass down, uncaring of the way whiskey sloshed over the rim. A small, cruel part of him wondered if Francis would lick it up when he was gone. “Have you no shame, Francis? Our First has barely passed his last breath and you’re taking shots at his poor widow? And for what? A swipe at _me?_ I confess I do not understand you, Francis. Perhaps I _am_ a fool for ever trying.”

Francis shut his eyes and turned away. He lifted his glass to his lips once again. James burned to knock it from his hands, to dash the contents of his decanter, his cabinet entire, onto the ice.

“I admired him, you know,” Francis said, voice low.

James snorted.

“You hated him, it was plain to see.”

“I didn’t… _hate_ him,” Francis said, hissing the offending word as though it were blasphemy. A funny little turn in a man who demanded and taunted to be fucked, to be stuffed full to brimming with cock, on the regular. “I first met him in Van Diemen’s Land. He was warm and avuncular. There was a certain comfort in that. I came to see his flaws on this expedition. I came to realize he would kill us all, and for what? His pride. His… _ego_.”

“I’ll not hear you speak ill of him, Francis,” James said. “He was—” Dear God, his voice broke. There was a lump in his throat James had to swallow down most viciously. Francis made no mention of his tears in the immediate aftermath of Sir John’s death, but he most certainly would now, the mood he was in. The drink in him. To hear James say Sir John was as a father to him these last years would most likely earn Francis’s open ridicule. “He was a good man,” James said instead. “He was a good man and I— _the men_ —loved him.” 

Francis pressed his lips together, no doubt knitting away some cruelty that threatened to trip off his tongue. James almost sneered and said something to the effect of not knowing Francis had the capacity to curb his worst urges, but James clenched his jaw and kept that sentiment to himself, as well. 

If Francis would try, James would answer in kind. 

_Don’t ever call me Francis again!_

James would not later recall with any exactitude the majority of the words exchanged in that explosive encounter, but Francis spitting that command at him rang between his ears as surely as the glancing blow of Francis’s fist. 

It meant, he knew, the end of their intimate association. 

James would laugh if he were not so aggrieved. For more than a year they had had their understanding; not a particularly warm one, not one with soft touch or nourishing meetings of the mind, but for James, it stood as the longest such association of his life. And, he could see now, likely his only.

They were not going to survive the Arctic. He could admit as much now, if only to himself. 

Men like him, men with secrets upon secrets upon secrets, men whose heads were turned only by other men, were not made for love, he knew. That he longed for it nonetheless made him pathetic and ridiculous.

This is what James ruminated on as he entered the meeting Francis had called after they ran the Tuunbaq off, after Mr. Blanky lost his leg. Francis, laid low by the blow to Blanky, still slurring with the drink, announced, “I’m going to be unwell, gentleman.” A rushing, like that of the open sea, filled James’s ears, but underneath the flurry of sound he knew was only his own blood, James heard Francis say that James was the captain now. 

He listened to him tell the four of them—James, Jopson, Little and McDonald—that he intended to dry out.

James watched with a sinking heart as Francis wept. As Francis implored them to care for him as if the only way to get any such consideration was by command. And James listened as Jopson replied, zealously as an apostle, “You needn’t worry for a thing, sir.”

James saw, heard all of this—and his innards felt as shredded as Mr. Blanky’s leg. For what reason, he could not countenance. 

James visited Blanky on _Terror_ the next day. He remained in Mr. McDonald’s care, having his dressings changed and his wound tended, dosed with spirits and coca. James found the man at his leisure, a lantern swaying gently above his head as he read something that looked suspiciously like a book directly from the collection of one John Bridgens. 

“And how is—” James peered at the title as he took the seat beside Blanky’s cot. “—Phaedra today?”

One side of Blanky’s mouth curled up and he shut the book with a finger inside, holding his place. He looked at the title himself— _Hippolytus_.

“Is that what I’m reading?” he said. “I confess, captain, that I am off my tits.”

Sure enough, Blanky’s eyelids drooped unevenly, as a child awake long past bedtime.

James chuckled and ventured a bump of his elbow against Blanky’s. It was a brotherly sort of gesture he might have expected of Francis, given their apparent intimacy. Perhaps he overstepped in his estimation of his own rapport with Blanky, but James believed all of Francis’s duties his now, even this. 

“Ah, well,” James said. “No need to sharpen the mind with the classics in a time like this, Thomas. You should be resting. I merely wished to see how you fared.”

“’M fine, captain,” Blanky said. “Dreadful bored, is all. Hence the reading.”

“How is the pain?”

“Absolutely fucked, sir,” Blanky said, and sniggered. James let out a real laugh, marveling at the joy of it. “Your Mr. Bridgens is only trying to keep my mind off it.”

“Good man, Bridgens.”

“Aye,” Blanky said. “Knows all. Sees all. Is yet kind, despite it. Stewards, eh? Everyone underestimates them.”

“Not you though,” James said. “I imagine there’s not much gets past you, Mr. Blanky.”

Blanky only hummed and let himself lie back in his cot. James allowed himself the indulgence of fussing with the blanket before he stood to take his leave.

“I’ll leave you to it, Mr. Blanky,” he said. “Do not hesitate to ask for me, should you need anything. Or Bridgens, for that matter.” He wanted to tell the man to come see him when he was well enough; James had lingering questions about the events at Fury Beach. But seeing Blanky—great, towering Blanky—lying there, near insensate, he told himself there was time enough. All they had now was time. 

He reached up to snuff out the lantern, but Blanky’s hand shot out, caught him by the elbow.

“Francis was in here,” he said. “He told me—he told me—”

James sank back down and laid his hand on Blanky’s. The clutching fingers loosened, but he squeezed at James’s with a desperation far outside what James knew of his character. 

“Hush now,” James said. “Perhaps a mite more gin, help you sleep?”

“Francis can’t bear the smell.”

James nodded.

“Yes,” he said. “That I know.”

“He’ll not be by to see me again,” Blanky said. “Not til he’s clear.”

James squeezed his hand. 

“You mustn’t worry over him, Thomas,” James said. “The best steward in the service is looking after him.”

Blanky laughed again, that perverse snickering of his.

“Aye,” he said. “And you’ll look after his ships. His men.”

“Of course,” James said.

Blanky’s grip loosened further and slipped from James’s arm. James arranged his arm under the blankets. 

“You’ll not abandon him,” Blanky went on, eyes shut, voice gone vague. “Not now he needs you most.”

A lump gathered in James’s throat.

“No, of course I won’t,” he said. “We will see him through, won’t we Mr. Blanky?”

Blanky muttered something unintelligible before subsiding into a sleep James could only hope was peaceful in its dreamlessness. James patted the blanket where Blanky’s hand was. 

_This is whom Francis loves_ , James thought, swallowing past that damnable lump. _This is who is worth the suffering, the **risk** of drying out. This, and no one else. Not even Miss Cracroft._

__James pressed his lips together. His eyes burned but he refused to let tears fall. How absurd, how piteous a man was he, to be weeping when his was not among the bodies failing now? When it was only his spirit that rotted, whilst Blanky and Francis needed all the spirit available to carry them through?_ _

__There wasn’t a soul near sickbay, not even McDonald. James kissed Blanky on the forehead and lingered there, eyes closed. He sent up a prayer for the health and safety of two hard men who loved each other._ _

__

__Jopson was quite the mongoose, guarding his lair. And so _polite_ whilst dodging and blocking—truly a feat of social graces, conducted by a man with a spine of steel. But he took pity on James eventually, and allowed him into Francis’s chambers on what he termed “a good day.”_ _

__Francis was asleep and not stirring. The air was sour as though with a past foulness, but not to the extent to which James had braced himself; Jopson had been busy clearing away the sick and the voiding, had even, to James’s eye, cleaned Francis and set his hair to rights, made sure he was presentable even in the depths of his illness. James felt a great swell of affection for Jopson, who would never fail his captain, even in ways that captain would never request. Suddenly and with the staggering release of relief, James knew Jopson was going to get Francis through. McDonald may be the medical man at the helm of his treatment, but the devotion, the care, the soft touch and sure hands that would see Francis live through this—that was Thomas Jopson. James could be only grateful._ _

__Jopson was about to give James and Francis their privacy—for what, when Francis was thus unconscious, James could not fathom—when James halted him with a hand on his shoulder._ _

__“Sit with me, Jopson,” he said. “Indulge me.”_ _

__“Yes, sir,” Jopson said. He disappeared behind the curtain again to fetch another chair. James took the seat that was already there—Jopson’s, surely. A book lay beside it. James imagined Jopson reading Francis some ancient play recommended by Bridgens, who had a book for every occasion. Francis, in pain, unable to comprehend anything but that someone who cared for him was taking the time to read to him. Yes, James was glad of Thomas Jopson._ _

__Jopson pulled the chair up beside him and tucked a lock of hair behind his ear. In silence they watched Francis breathe. Occasionally he snored or even made a low keening sound that tore at James’s heart. Jopson soothed him by stroking a hand down his back._ _

__“How has it been?” James asked. Jopson looked up at him and James’s mouth twisted. “Stupid question, I suppose: it’s been godawful, I know.”_ _

__“It has been...a challenge,” Jopson said, ever circumspect. “Dr. McDonald and I are hopeful that we’ve seen him through the worst of it.”_ _

__James was desperate to ask what the worst of it was. He had known men forced from the soothing arms of opium against their wills—men he had never seen again after a “passing illness” had taken their lives. What was it about the vices of intoxication that gripped men so? Surely there were medical texts, scientific texts he could procure that would tell him the mechanism of the thing, but who could know the meat of it more intimately than Jopson? Jopson, whom James knew he could never ask. Jopson, whose sealed lips could surely rival a beartrap._ _

__“Is there anything I can do?” James ventured instead._ _

__Jopson slanted a queer, sad little smile at him._ _

__“Thank you, sir,” he said. “I have it quite in hand, I do assure you.”_ _

__“Not for him, Jopson,” James said. “I doubt there’s a soul on this earth that could do better for him. I meant for you. Have you rested? Have you eaten? I would make this easier for you, if I could.”_ _

__Jopson blinked but buried any surprise he might have felt. A flush rose to his cheeks._ _

__“Ah,” he said. “Dr. McDonald and I trade shifts so that I might sleep.”_ _

__“And are your shifts always longer by a mile?”_ _

__Jopson sent him a rueful smile._ _

__“Guilty, sir,” he said. “But it’s no matter. I’m happy to serve the captain this way, and Dr. McDonald has more than one patient aboard. I—I wouldn’t abdicate my duties for anything.”_ _

__“You, Mr. Jopson, are a good and loyal mother hen.” James winked at him and Jopson huffed out a low laugh. He dropped his gaze back to Francis, and James followed suit. A mournful whine whistled out of the body before them, and Jopson went back to stroking long, slow lines down Francis’s back. He reached for a basin at the foot of the bed and dabbed delicately at Francis’s forehead with the damp rag inside._ _

__James wished he were the one with leave to reach out. James wished a great many things._ _

__“He would appreciate your being here, sir,” Jopson said._ _

__James hummed, an ambiguous little note, but Jopson, like Bridgens, missed nothing._ _

__“He _would_ , sir,” he insisted. “I know he’s—hard to know, sir. But he would not have brought you into the meeting and formally left the expedition in your care if he didn’t think highly of you.”_ _

__“Jopson, he punched me in the face.”_ _

__Only a thinning of his lips where he pressed them together betrayed Jopson’s opinion._ _

__“He wasn’t well, sir. I _am_ sorry for that.”_ _

__“Good lord, Jopson!” James couldn’t help it—he belted out a humorless laugh. “It’s hardly your responsibility to apologize for things he did at his worst. Besides, here we are. There’s naught left to forgive between us, is there?”_ _

__“If you don’t mind the impertinence, sir…”_ _

__“Please, Jopson.”_ _

__“I believe the pair of you are two people with a great left deal to say to each other.”_ _

__James, never one to be lost for words, found them snatched from his tongue as though by a naughty sprite. Jopson’s gaze seared his, but Francis shifted, groaning, and Jopson bent to his purpose as if James were not present at all._ _

__“You’d better go, sir,” he said, an apology coloring his voice. “There is much to do on _Erebus_ , I’m certain.”_ _

__“Thank you for your forbearance, Mr. Jopson,” James said, standing. He passed through the curtains but held them open. “And thanks, too, for attending to Francis so well.”_ _

__Jopson’s eyes were green. Green and clear over the blush on his cheeks._ _

__“Thank you, Captain Fitzjames.”_ _

__“You’ll inform me if there’s anything you require.”_ _

__“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”_ _

__James nodded, and Jopson snapped the curtain shut as Francis began to moan. James made haste out of the captain’s quarters, to spare them all the humiliation of hearing Francis in such pain._ _

__

__Sir John, bless him, knew the value of morale. He knew the value of a good revel. He had left trunks full of fripperies for just such an event as Carnivale. James rifled through the garments and spared a thought as to what Sir John would have chosen for himself. A big man, tall and grand—perhaps the angel’s wings? Something his great shoulders would not have strained; something forgiving of a waist that had seen trimmer days._ _

__James felt a bit of velvet at the bottom of the trunk. He pulled at it and a dress unfurled before him. No Britannia, this—and no proper ladies’ dress, either. No space for a pair of tits, no matter how modest. This was a costume, perhaps the garment of a reedy boy destined to play Juliet or some such. It was no fine thing. Tattered and older than James himself, maybe by decades. Smelling musty. Moth-eaten here or there. A faded and muddy once-pink that wouldn’t flatter James in the least._ _

__And yet._ _

__He felt a sensation very much like the one he had when watching Jopson tend to Francis. A swelling inside his body, as if his heart had crowded out his lungs. He felt bigger than himself—wider, as though he could swallow the universe. An aimless longing, woven alongside something within himself he could not name. Not a lack, but a knowing. As if James’s body knew something his mind was yet blind to._ _

__He stroked over fabric that was no longer soft. He laid the dress against his body and admired himself in the mirror. He let himself imagine, just for a moment, that he was a different sort of person._ _


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter fulfills the "I Had to Choose" square on my Terror Bingo card. Also, it is now a No Fake Hickey AU _and_ a Slower Onset of Scurvy AU.

Three nights after Carnivale, it was Francis who made the trek to _Erebus_ , to shake James from his brown study. James would have thought it a great jape, if he weren’t so hollowed out by the memory seared into his mind’s eye—the sight, the sound, the shocking heat after years of bone-deep cold, the _smell_ —of Dr. Stanley’s fire raging through the men. Men James had trapped with his fool party. 

It was ironic, he knew, that he wished he could annihilate himself with drink, but he found he had no stomach for it. A mere whiff of his favorite brandy now sent his stomach roiling, flames licking higher and higher behind his eyelids, stealing the breath from his lungs.

Though Francis was pale, he had lost the grey tint of his long illness, and no longer looked as though the bony finger of Death himself had touched him with avaricious intent. He appeared in the wardroom, where James was morbing away over his maps. He breathed heavily and leaned in the jamb when he arrived, as if the work of getting out of his slops had been exhausting. 

“Good lord, Francis,” James said. “You might have summoned me and saved yourself the trouble.”

“I needed the air,” Francis said. A faint smile curled his mouth. “And a turn about the room.”

James snorted and passed a hand over his brow. He stood and pulled out a chair for Francis. He didn’t dare take his arm to lend him his strength.

“At least tell me you didn’t make the trek alone,” he said.

“Little accompanied me,” Francis said, taking the seat. “He was quite patient about my snail’s pace, and he made that hangdog face at me all the while.”

“As I would have, were I he,” James said. “Honestly, Francis, you’re only now on the mend.”

“And I’ll regain none of my strength if I do not exercise what I have. Don’t be tiresome, James.”

“Yes, God forbid I should express concern for my first.”

Where Francis might once have sneered at him and said something cutting, he now merely gazed at James with eyes far kinder than his tongue ever was. It was ever those eyes that led James to be reckless with his body, his heart. James never knew what to do with Francis’s soft looks. He had often wondered if Francis knew what he looked like at all. If he knew how he looked at James when he forgot to be so incensed by him. James shook his head and tore his eyes away. The map lay before him, marked exactly the same as it was an hour ago, a day, a week. He stared through it as silence bloomed between them.

Bridgens arrived with a tea service. James was absurdly grateful for the break in the moment, which felt sharp and fragile, liable to shatter into a thousand shards to pierce James’s fool heart.

“Will you be dining with Captain Fitzjames tonight, Captain Crozier?” Bridgens asked as he poured the tea. 

James felt Francis’s eyes on him, but refused to look anywhere but at Bridgens. Francis shifted in his seat.

“I think I will, Mr. Bridgens, unless Captain Fitzjames has other plans.”

James shook his head.

“There we have it,” Francis said, slapping the table. “Not too much of whatever’s on the menu for me, please, Bridgens, and naught to drink but some water. Please tell Lieutenant Little I may be some time.”

“Yes, sir.”

Bridgens nodded and took his leave. James wrapped his hands around the blessed warmth of the teacup. Francis nudged the sugar towards him. James raised his brows and ventured a glance at last. Francis’s one eyebrow was set at that jaunty angle again.

“You think I don’t know how you take your tea?”

“I think you’ve been consumed by your own concerns for many years, now.”

James braced himself for Francis to lash out, but no dressing down came. Francis only pressed his lips together and nodded. His damnable eyes were soft again. James could hardly bear it.

“Yes,” Francis said. “A failing of mine it is now clear to see. Did you know I promised myself, a long time ago, that if ever I were a captain, I would endeavor to see and know my men, to forge a personal accord with them wherever possible? I believed—I _believe_ —that the true mettle of a captain lies not only in his ability to lead with a clear head, but with love in his heart. A good captain shows his men he values each one on his own terms; that he may be above them in rank but not in the eyes of God.”

James stared at Francis as if he had never seen him before. Somehow there was a queer thickening in his throat he was obliged to swallow down. He was sitting and yet felt wrong-footed, liable to stumble. This Francis—eyes clear, cheeks flushed with the cold rather than with drink, speaking so plainly and without recrimination—James did not know this Francis. 

“And what?” he said in a croak. His lip curled up in contempt. “That means you’ve suddenly come over all magnanimous with me? You know how I take my tea, so you think that wipes our slate clean?”

Francis sat back and pulled his tea up to his chest in both hands. The steam rose into his face as he regarded James with an unreadable expression. After a long, elastic moment, he finally said, “I know how you take your tea, I know you’ve been recording all manner of scientific findings with Dr. Goodsir, I know you have in the past enjoyed a robust correspondence with your sister-in-law.” Here he leaned forward, planted his elbows on he knees, teacup between them, and peered up at James through his eyelashes. “I know you miss the warmth of Sir John’s company and find mine a pale and insulting substitute. I know, James, that you are holed up in this room, eschewing the company of your dearest friend Le Vesconte, and looking at this map til your eyes cross because you’ve twisted yourself up about what happened at Carnivale.”

James felt his lip tremble before he got a grip on himself. He could not speak for the lump in his throat. He shook his head—a denial? a refusal? a plea? He didn’t know. 

Francis let out a long, measured breath and sat up again. He took pity on James at last and looked away. He sipped at his tea—no bloody sugar.

“You are not responsible for Dr. Stanley’s actions,” he said.

Something hot and huge and painful burst inside James.

“You just now finished telling me it is the captain’s duty to know each man on his ship so as to inspire confidence and devotion, and you have the gall, the _temerity_ to tell me I’m not responsible for Dr. Stanley’s actions? Why, because I’m just the second, and an inexperienced one to boot? Because I’m just a fool who can’t be expected to—who can’t—” James was horrified to choke on the words, eyes burning. 

“Because,” Francis said, his calm infuriating in the face of James’s explosion, “it wasn’t your hands that tied the tents shut, nor spilled spirits all around, nor _set yourself on fire in a crowded room_.”

“I had those tents built!” James said, and damned if the words he wanted to be searing came out pleading instead, limned with despair. “I had our wine and ale set out, I had no one on watch, I allowed the men to lose themselves in drink and merriment!”

Francis made an abortive movement as if he were about to reach out and lay his hand on James, but thought better of it at the last moment. James didn’t know whether to hate him for abstaining or be grateful. _Coward_ , he thought. Whether he meant Francis or himself, he couldn’t say.

“Dr. Stanley calculated this,” Francis said. “He planned and executed it with the kind of precision only he could attain. There was no predicting this, James.”

James hunched over his own cup of tea to hide his face. All he could do was shake his head. Burnt up black bodies smoked behind his eyes. Men who were identified not because they were recognized but because their absence was noted in the days following.

They had lost Drs. McDonald _and_ Peddie.

He heard Francis sigh.

“If it’s guilt you must assign, James, you can put it on me,” Francis said. “I wasn’t there. I failed my duties.”

James closed his eyes, shook his head again. He gulped at his cup of tea and deserved the burning of his tongue.

“You did what was necessary, Francis,” he said, voice a rumble. “You did the right thing and for your pains we now have a fighting chance.”

“I should never have let it come to that.”

“Francis. It was strong and brave and _proper_ , what you did. I’ll not hear otherwise.”

James could feel Francis’s eyes on him. The back of his neck heated despite the cold. He felt mortified and foolish and had the distinct feeling Francis had maneuvered him into a corner. 

“I can’t lift this burden for you,” Francis said after a long moment where nothing filled the silence but breath and creaking timbers. “And I know I am not…whom you would choose for a confidante. But your men need you now. We must abandon the ships and take our chances on the ice as a united front. We must be the captains they need. I can’t shoulder that alone, James.”

“You won’t,” James said. His breath was a tight and fluttersome thing.

“All right, then,” Francis said. He ran one blunt fingertip over the coastline of King William Land. “We walk out in three and a half months. We have work to do.”

With the improvement of Francis’s health came an increase in his visits to _Erebus_. He and James alternated their evenings on either ship, debating this or that route, the number of sledges, possible hunting parties and the best directions in which to point them. These evenings no longer devolved into shouting matches or disagreements so bitter that they could hardly bear to look at each other a moment longer, but neither did the spark of heat James still felt between them flame into consummation. 

Without the drink in him, Francis made no eyes at James, and James, discombobulated without a set of rules that included “no whiskey,” could not fathom an attempt at seduction. If the way they debased themselves together could be called seduction. It seemed a part of a different life—a different pair of captains too consumed with themselves to be careful with each other. 

James felt very far from the man he had been then. 

He stood about waiting for Francis in the wardroom, fiddling with the lay of the map, nursing a glass of Allsop’s. Weak though the swill was, Francis was ever turning it away; James wondered now if he ought to abstain as well, in solidarity. As things stood, James imbibed what little was left of their stores of alcohol only when not in Francis’s company. It would be nothing to refuse the Allsop’s as well, to take only water, melted from the ice, as Francis did. 

He was debating draining the glass before Francis arrived or waiting for Bridgens to come take it away when the man himself appeared, hair askew and cheeks pink, with a tremor of trouble playing along that fearsome brow.

“What is it?” James said, Allsop’s forgotten. “Francis?”

Francis’s expression gentled into one of befuddlement. He gazed at James for a long moment as dread stirred in James’s belly, but finally he stepped inside and looked around as if for the first time. 

“I just passed the captain’s quarters,” he said. “You’ve not moved in yet?” 

James blinked.

“What? What’s that to do with anything?”

“There’s more room in there,” Francis said. “You might even be able to turn over in your berth.”

James clenched his teeth and sat down, turning away from Francis’s eyes on him. 

“You couldn’t possibly think I would simply clear his things and plant my flag.”

“It’s been more than seven months,” Francis said. James pulled a book towards himself and stared through the words on the page intently, not a single letter absorbed. Francis took his customary seat at the head of the table, close to James. James could feel him take up the space of the room, his presence a balm that put him at ease and provided succor, which James was now fighting the urge to flee. He refused to look up to meet Francis’s eyes. “James…”

“I know how long it’s been, Francis!”

Francis expelled a weary sigh. There came a touch on James’s shoulder; he would have prided himself on not startling had it lasted any longer than a moment. 

“We’re going to have to go through his things, James,” Francis said. “To decide what we can carry back to those he left behind.”

James passed a hand over his face. He hadn’t considered that Lady Jane and Miss Cracroft might want something of this place, but of course they would. His journals. His logs. Maybe a momento or two.

“Much to carry,” he said, voice rough.

Francis squeezed his shoulder, and James shifted enough to be able to peer at him slantwise. This time the hand didn’t drop, and James ventured a touch himself. He squeezed the hand on his shoulder. The shock of its warmth shuddered through him.

“There may come a time when we must abandon those things that aren’t essential,” Francis said. “But I made a promise I couldn’t keep. The least I can do now is attempt to bring something of him back to them.”

“You’re right, of course,” James said. He let Francis’s hand go and it dropped away; James wished he’d held fast, kept that little bloom of heat safe in his palm. He shivered at the loss.

“I know you find me callous on the subject of Sir John,” Francis said, and at that James lifted his head at last, poised to protest, but Francis held up a hand and favored him with a queer, sad smile. “And maybe deservedly so, but James—we are about to embark on an eight-hundred-mile journey, and he’s not here to appreciate the piousness with which you martyr yourself to discomfort. Take the captain’s berth.”

James shook his head.

“My berth is my own,” he said. “What’s an extra half-foot’s width to the luxury of the familiar, a cradle whose peaks and valleys match the exact foibles of my body?” He flushed when he met Francis’s eyes, sparkling under the quirk of his brow, and turned away again. Peaks and valleys indeed.

He felt it when Francis sat back. He felt Francis’s eyes on him, and the wheels turning about Francis’s head. He wished he had the gall to ask which thoughts spurred him so.

“Far be it from me to part a man from his own bed,” Francis said lightly. “Savor its little peccadillos, commit them to memory to warm you there, when you’re sharing a sack and a bedroll with—” He cleared his throat. “—some other man who’ll saw away in your ear and knee you in the bollocks in the night.” He chuckled, and James got his gall up to face him again.

“Some other man?” he said. “Are the captains not to bunk together?”

The light was not too low to see the flush in Francis’s cheeks. James’s heart swooped like a swallow to see a smile twist up one corner of Francis’s mouth.

“I think it best for purposes of captainly business, yes,” he said. “But I was not about to order any such thing if you preferred to share a tent with, say, Le Vesconte.”

James shook his head. Dundy, even just the thought of him, filled him with a curious mix of nostalgia, melancholy, and guilt. Dundy was his dearest friend, but if James was far from the man he once was, so too was he far from Dundy, whose friendship had been forged on laughter and japes and adventure and, it must be said, the exuberant levity of frequent drunkenness, of which James no longer indulged. James roiled with thoughts, both wild and mundane, which he could not imagine revealing to Dundy—to anyone. Sometimes he wondered if they knew how to speak to each other at all now that hunger had carved them to the bone and there was not a laugh to be had for miles and years and lifetimes past. 

“The captains…should be of an accord,” James said. Francis smiled as if shy of him, and then Bridgens was there with their supper.

Sir John had, perhaps, possibly, it could be said, brought far too much on the expedition. Mr. Hoar had kept everything neat as a pin and clear of dust and grime, but he could not hide the ostentation of Sir John’s belongings. Stepping into his quarters for the first time since his death gave James a vertiginous sense of stepping backwards in time, and as if through a mirror into another world he saw everything for what it was: ridiculous and unnecessary, expensive for the sake of being expensive, the stuff of skewed priorities. An entire library of books James wasn’t certain he had ever seen the man crack, other than a handful of favorites, including the Bible. Ornate china and silver cutlery—for what? The command team had eaten on Navy-issue china all expedition, and the men from plates and bowls of dented tin. Trunk upon trunk of clothing, much of it inappropriate for the weather, some of it costumery. James fondled a ribbon, a bit of lace, but shoved the garments deep into the trunk and shut it, lest he become as preposterous as all this detritus. 

At the clap of the trunk closing, Francis looked up from where he was sat at Sir John’s desk, sifting through his journals and old maps, his loose sheafs of paper, on which there were no doubt scores of sermons given over the years. Francis was clutching no fewer than five pens, and had lined up three pots of ink.

“There’s…so much,” James said.

“Yes,” Francis said. “I’m…I don’t wish to betray his confidence, but I find I have to read all of this to determine if it’s worth keeping for Lady Jane.”

James barked out a laugh, and a smile burst out across Francis’s face as if he were surprised into it.

“Any terrible secrets?” he asked. “A seething hatred of Sir George Barrow, perhaps, or a passion for the food of the lower classes?”

Francis snorted and waved some paper in the air before he set it down again.

“He thought the world of you and not much of me, I can tell you that,” he said.

The smile slipped from James’s face, and he suddenly felt anything but merry.

“Francis—”

“Some gossip amongst the lieutenants, speculation about whom you and Gore and Le Vesconte may wish to marry upon our return to England, odd little passages in which he extols the expertise of Reid and Blanky whilst defying said expertise and asserting, against all reason, that God will see us through.” He shook his head. “His diaries, I think, contain more personal notes—letters to Eleanor, Lady Jane, Miss Cracroft. They read more like…like desperate missives to himself. At first it seems as though each entry is appropriate for its recipient, but there comes a point...” He looked up at James. “Should it all go to them? Is it inappropriate? Is any of it fit for ladies’ eyes? Do we give them some spare shadow of the man he was, cold comfort, or the full unvarnished man, afraid and delusional, by turns angry and elated?”

“I don’t know,” James whispered. Francis started as if snapping back to himself, and collected all the papers in a crooked stack. He tapped them on the desk to no avail. 

“How is it in there?” he asked.

“Overwhelming,” James said, “but I suppose I shouldn’t think of it as though we were packing. It’s all…it’ll all be at the bottom of the ocean, someday.” He swallowed past the thickening of his throat. 

“Look in his berth,” Francis said, leafing through the papers once more with a furrow in his brow. “He brought daguerreotypes.”

James paused a moment to take him in—the stoop of his shoulders as he bent over the pages. Pages and pages of Sir John’s failings. Sir John’s misplaced priorities, his disdain for Francis, his reckless disregard of the advice of men who knew better than he, his damnable, wasted pride. Francis pored over all of this and seemed not incensed, not upset, not angry—only determined. Thorough. Certain of his duty in finding something suitable for the women Sir John left behind. 

James wondered if any of the marriage conjecture in Sir John’s logs included Francis and Miss Cracroft.

He ducked into the berth. Mr. Hoar had folded the bedding and the blankets and set them at the foot of the berth with a pillow on top. A great emptiness opened up and yawned inside James. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. They would have to take those blankets. The pillow and bedding too. Anything to put between bodies and the cruel lick of the Arctic air when they walked out. 

James found five daguerreotypes without having to paw through too many drawers. The most recent one depicted Lady Jane and Miss Cracroft sitting side by side with Sir John stood behind them. The rest were portraits, photographed and developed into imperfect daguerreotypes and set in gilt frames nonetheless: one of Lady Jane in her bridal finery, one of a young Miss Cracroft holding the infant Eleanor, one of Miss Cracroft in the first flush of her young womanhood, and one of Eleanor at the same age, wearing the same dress, striking the same posture. Enamored of her elder cousin, no doubt, and wishing to emulate her in all things. 

James rubbed his thumb over the cool gaze of the adult Sophia Cracroft. She was a plain sort of girl—not poorly made by any definition, perhaps even pretty to an eye better turned by the appeal of the feminine, but no great beauty. No Helen of Troy. There was nothing physical that helped James understand why Francis remained, even now, so devoted. What was striking about her, James decided, were the eyes. The challenge there, and the distinct message it held: underestimate me to your peril. _This,_ James thought, _is what beguiles him._

Francis came up behind James and reached for the daguerreotype. James caught himself before he startled, and relinquished the image without protest. Francis sighed.

“She’s lovely, isn’t she?”

“Oh.” All James could think of was how he could feel Francis’s living warmth, beating into him as surely as the rays of the sun. “Yes, of course.”

“I should have known she wasn’t for me.”

James turned his head and leaned enough to be able to look Francis in the face. A self-deprecating twist of his mouth betrayed as much chagrin as amusement.

“You’re worth ten of her, Francis,” James said. He was taken aback at his own vehemence; though Francis’s brow gathered, he looked only pensive.

“How do you figure that, with your broken dip circle?” 

The joke punched a laugh out of James, and he bumped Francis with a shoulder. Francis laughed and James laughed, and then they were slumped together on the berth, daguerreotype on James’s thigh, Francis’s hand on daguerreotype. A point of heat in all the cold.

“I can’t give her the things a woman seeks in marriage,” Francis said, voice low. 

“You’ll be knighted when we get home,” James said. “You can retire your commission and join the Admiralty—you may not be bloody _landed_ , Francis, but you’re damn well worth some consideration.”

“I’m old enough to be her father.”

“Hell, Francis,” James said. “You’re old enough to be _my_ father, if you were terribly naughty as a middie.”

James felt something tender inside himself burst into bloom when Francis laughed. James drank it in: the sparkle of blue eyes in the low light of the cabin, the joy lines at the corners of his eyes, the curve of thin lips and the rumble of his laughter, reverberating through James’s body. Francis’s laughed died away and his attention dropped to James’s mouth. James licked his lips, held his breath.

“I don’t love her anymore,” Francis whispered.

“There’s the rub.”

“Aye.”

James let his eyes fall half shut as he leaned forward. 

“Do you know who Sir John fancied you marrying?” Francis said.

James snapped back and blinked.

“What was that?”

“In his little daydreams, do you know who he had you with?”

“Francis.”

“It was Eleanor, of course.” He cracked one of those wide, unexpectedly sunny grins of his, the kind that showed off the gap in his front teeth. “He wanted you for a son-in-law, James. That’s how well he thought of you.”

James shook his head. How was he to say something unspeakable—that his head had never been turned by a woman? Surely, Francis had guessed at such. Surely, he didn’t have to say it.

“I’m not—I’ve never even met the girl.”

“It’s something though, isn’t it?” Francis said. “His esteem. His trust.”

James swallowed, nodding. Francis looked at him for a long moment before he unfurled from the berth like a bird from its nest. He held up the newest daguerreotype. 

“I’ll pack this away with the journals and logs,” he said. “They’ll have the originals of the others.”

Dumbly James nodded again. 

“Did you see anything else worth the extra weight?”

James located his voice at last.

“Not for them,” he said. He twisted in place and lifted the stack of bedding into his lap. “We’ll need these, and there may be others squirreled away.”

“An excellent idea,”Francis said. “Let us forget to mention to whom these things belonged.”

“Capital,” James said. Francis winked at him as he took his leave, and James let out a great sigh and slumped back into the berth he’d once said he’d never lie in.

The nights grew shorter, the temperatures warmer, and the date of their leaving closer. The aurora would pass when March did, and so Francis cajoled James into a smoke on deck. It was empty but for one man on the dog watch, and he kept himself to himself at the stern of the ship. James planted his elbows on the taffrail, Francis budged up warm beside him, and cast his eyes out across the desolation of the ice.

From _Terror_ , it was easy to see how the ice had crushed _Erebus_. Her bowsprit and foremast rose into the air, proud as any tall building reaching for the London sky, but it was splintered and shabby, snow drifts like clouds of meringue gathering along her keel, hiding the way she split. 

Where _Terror_ seemed hopelessly embattled by ice but reasonably sound, it was clear that _Erebus_ would never sail again.

James thought back to the countless paintings of shipwrecks he’d seen—images that captured his imagination and enflamed his sense of adventure and high romance. Ships in storms, ships shattered on rocks, ships torn apart by cannonballs. In a different life, they made him want to catch the next breeze to some faraway place. In a different life, they made him want to pick up his pencils and make something beautiful.

James’s pencils were packed away, never to be held again. He wanted to forget the sight of his ship brought so low. Better to let her sink to the ocean floor without a visual record than subject her to the judging eyes and clucking tongues of some ignorant public. Better to bury her humiliation in these frozen wastes forever— and his own.

Green light churned and undulated above them against a backdrop of midnight blue that faded into purple and then into pink. Occasionally he could hear the aurora, a crackle akin to a lingering lightning strike. He watched Francis’s smoke weave a ladder towards the roil of color before dissipating.

“There was a time I would have been staggered before this display,” James said. He squinted up into the show. “Like an acolyte at last hearing the voice of God.”

“You no longer find it beautiful?” Francis asked. He turned around and leaned back against the taffrail. Francis, James found, conversed most intimately when his eyes could meet James’s.

“I suppose my sense of beauty has been skewed,” James said. “It _is_ beautiful, isn’t it? I know it intellectually and aesthetically. Of course it is. But it’s a bit like—” James twisted his mouth and flicked his wrist toward all the swallowing white. “—admiring the dance of the flames in hell.”

Francis snorted out a laugh and leaned his head back. The line of his neck was bared to James’s sight, to the cold, but he watched the aurora thus regardless. He held out his pipe and James took it. James wasn’t much for tobacco, but he took a draw anyway.

“I always tell myself I should appreciate it more,” Francis said. “That there will come a time when I haven’t seen a pole in some years, and I’ll be sighing over my memories of freezing my arse off under God’s kaleidoscope.”

“Why do you—”

James cut himself off and looked away. Beyond _Erebus_ was a veritable mountain of ice stacked on ice, the work of years without a thaw. That, too, had its particular beauty.

Francis righted himself and leaned over to catch James’s eyes. _Damn your eyes_ , Francis had once said to him. _Damn yours, Francis._

“Speak plain, James,” Francis said. “Are we not beyond censoring ourselves for propriety now?”

“Why do you keep coming back?” James said. “All your expeditions with Parry, including the abandonment of the _Fury_ , and still you come. You say it was for the sake of Miss Cracroft’s peace of mind, but it’s you, Francis. There’s something in you that needs this place—this place that wants us dead, you told me.”

Francis held his gaze without betraying his own thoughts. James swallowed, licked his lips, gave the pipe a couple puffs, and tore his eyes away.

“Did you know I belong to the Royal Society?” Francis said. James frowned and ventured a glance back at Francis’s face. His nose was pink. His cheeks.

“I suppose I had heard that, yes.”

“I study magnetic fields. I hope you won’t think I’m flattering myself when I say I am one of the world’s foremost experts on the subject.”

James shook his head even as his innards quailed. He knew Francis’s work both here and in Antarctica had been invaluable, but hearing it in plain language, laid bare by a man who disliked boasting, made James feel like a rank amateur about to take a bollocking from a venerated professor. Francis pushed off from the hull and crossed his arms over his chest, bounced his shoulders up around his ears. He gave James a small, melancholy little smile. 

“There’s not much in the world that’s unseen, untouched,” he said. “Even here, there are the natives. To think them savages, or ignorant, because their ways are not ours is our own manner of ignorance. The things we could learn from them—the things we could learn about this place.” He shook his head as if boggling at the world of possibilities. Excitement lit his eyes, even in the dark. James’s heart ached. “There is a reason, James, that I am in the Discovery Service, and not...” Thin, bloodless lips knitted together, and James huffed out a laugh.

“Off in the wars getting shot just for a story to tell,” James said.

Francis grinned.

“Your words.”

“You’re telling me you’ve never reveled in the thought of finding the passage?”

Francis sighed and shrugged, but his mouth was still tilted in a smile, and his eyes on James’s face were soft. James’s heartbeat ticked up its pace.

“It was never going to be me, James,” Francis said. “The Admiralty made that clear, time and time again. But knowledge—studying, learning, recording, _knowing_ —they can’t take that away from me. If there’s glory on the same path, let another man claim it. I’ll be happy with the secrets of the world.”

He met James’s eyes and James’s breath left him. He felt split open and exposed, but instead of wishing to hide himself away, he longed instead to put himself in Francis’s hard and calloused hands. There could be no better care taken of him. There could be no gentler husbandry for all the tender parts of himself. 

He set the pipe down and murmured Francis’s name. He stepped forward, close enough to feel Francis’s breath on his face. Francis tilted his head back, lips parting. James cupped Francis’s face in begloved hands, said his name again. Francis’s eyes fluttered shut.

James pressed his mouth to Francis’s. The shock of heat behind cold, dry lips sent a thrill through him, like the spark along a fuse of dynamite. The touch of Francis’s tongue against his own, timid and careful, clenched at his heart. James deepened the kiss and Francis made a small sound, half pained and half savoring, before pushing himself chest to chest with James and melting into him. James gave himself over to the consuming heat of Francis’s kiss. The aurora flashed, the timbers of the ship creaked, and James’s blood sang in his veins.

It was Francis who at last pulled away, panting. James, having finally got what he’d felt he’d waited a lifetime for and loath to lose it again so soon, groped for Francis’s hands and held fast. 

“Francis, can we—” He shook his head. His thoughts were jumbled, half formed like wispy cumulus clouds. Francis looked up at him, and James read trepidation in his brow. He rushed to speak as if this fragile moment, as if Francis himself, might disappear into the silence. “Francis. I know it is not…a right and proper thing. I don’t know what proper means out here in any case. I merely wish—I hope you could consider trying again with me. Without all the pretense. Without having to behave like animals before we can admit that we might—desire those things which we desire. Just you and I, and our…accord.” 

James’s throat was dry, and he held his breath. Surely a merciful God would split the ice and swallow him away from his own mortification. Francis held his gaze for a long moment, James’s heart threatening to burst free of his ribcage, but then Francis pulled both James’s hands up to his face and pressed his exposed fingertips to his lips. James’s breath shuddered out of his lungs. He wanted to enfold Francis in his arms, to take him into his body just like this, to be a single warm and steady heartbeat, but after only a moment, Francis stepped away and regarded James as though searching for something. Whatever he found made him squeeze both of James’s hands. 

“Come down to my quarters with me,” he said. “There’s something I have to tell you.”


	3. Chapter 3

Once upon a time, a child was born in County Down in the north of Ireland where the hills are green and the cows are stubborn. 

_Are the cows of Ireland significantly more stubborn than other cows?_

_Do you want to hear this or not? Hush then._

This child was one of the last born to a family with many children, thirteen of whom survived infancy. When a family has that many children, a mother, or a grandmother, or a passel of elder sisters might believe they know everything there is to know about children and the business of raising them. They believe there is nothing new under the sun, or the rain, as is more common in those lovely green parts of the world. 

But this child, this 11th child passed between various women of the family without much care to the mind forming between the ears, knew something the rest of the family could not fathom.

You see, they believed the child female. At birth, the child had all the feminine parts bared to the naked eye; nothing seemed amiss. The family gave the child a girl’s name and dressed her in all her sisters’ old garments. The child was not to play in the mud or tangle the glory of her hair into knots that had no remedy but the shears. The child was not to play rough games with her brothers, nor the boys down the lane. The child was to play nicely with the other girls, and not soil her dresses or theirs with adventures in the fields. The child was not even to be educated in the same manner as her brothers. Why educate a girl, after all?

But the child understood what the family could not see: God had placed the heart of a man in the infant girl’s chest. 

_Francis…_

_Leave me if you want. Leave me and we will speak of nothing but expedition business henceforth._

_No, please. I’m sorry. Go on._

By the time the child was on the cusp of adolescence, several bitter truths had been revealed to him: that merely being who he was vexed his family and made him a convenient target for his father’s ire; that his lamentable body would not transform overnight to have the bearing, the _parts_ , of a normal man; that said lamentable body would soon…blossom like a garden with all manner of things the child wished to avoid. 

The boy—for that was what he was, no matter what sleight of hand God had performed—prayed for guidance. Where could he go that he might be free of his family and all their disappointments? Where might he flee such that all he had to hide was his body, not his thoughts, not his being? 

His first courses arrived and dashed his peace. He was tormented day and night, not only by the physical discomfort but the metaphysical, the spiritual—could he divorce this body, with its rivers of blood feeding its fertile fields and budding flowers? Could he cleave mind from body—or carve unwanted flesh from it as cleanly as a butcher?

_God, Francis, did you—_

He settled for cleaving hair from head, which eased some of his pains for a wild, joyous moment. When his mother saw him, she shrieked like a banshee and banished him to the barn. He spent a night nestled amongst the cows and peering at the stars through the holes in the roof. He found that he could name them from his lessons, and by their light he knew exactly where he was, and who he was. 

He followed those stars to the coast, where, clad in his brothers’ things and possessed of a new name all his own, he joined the Royal Navy.

The boy was glad to have found his vocation, and gladder still that he excelled. He was soon to learn, however, that his accent was an obstacle to his advancement, and though a sailor he may be, it was not in his character to find ease in the regular politicking of sailors. 

So, too, did he learn that his body was not done with him.

He was fond of the drink, our sailor, and fonder still of friendly touch, of which he had had so little. Whilst pretty girls turned his head same as any other man, he found he had darker impulses, more wicked appetites—and there was that type of fellow sailor, at port or at sea, who might encourage him to indulge. Thus he developed the safest terms under which to gratify those urges without revealing the fact of his…abnormality.

This combination, this wantonness paired with the tendency to make merry at any given opportunity, landed our sailor in trouble, more than once. Sometimes…sometimes trouble of the sort one cannot hide, nor unmake. It was after one such incident, whose consequences were grave indeed—

_What happened, Francis? Was the villain hanged? Give me a name!_

_Perhaps you are not in the proper frame of mind for a story._

_Francis!_

_Shall I call for tea?_

_Just keep going, for Christ’s sake. Ugh!_

After enduring the unfortunate episode and its adverse effects, our sailor resolved to be more careful than he had ever been before. He ceased these casual liaisons with other men, and occupied himself whenever possible with the fairer sex.

_At mollyhouses? How, without—_

He occupied himself with the fairer sex! Who never had complaints about his tongue, no matter what accent tripped off it!

_His **tongue?**_

Though his _appetite_ for women was strong, the sailor was at sea more often than not, and always in the company of men. He found he longed for the easy understanding between men of certain predilections, he longed for strong hands and thick cock, the scratch of stubble against his neck, the heady thrill of being desired so hotly that a man might risk everything for a taste. Abstaining as he had learned to do was a lonely business that left him empty and desolate, starved for touch. In the depths of his solitude, he began to spool out wild fantasies, fancying himself in love with this friend or that, friends whose heads never turned his way except in platonic companionship. He was…he was quite ridiculous.

_That I doubt very much._

So it happened when he was well over forty and had fooled himself into believing he had grown out of these flights of romantic fancy, he went on an expedition that brought him around the Cape of Good Hope towards Van Diemen’s Land. There, he met a girl who charmed and dazzled him, who seemed as taken with him as he was with her. He was so swept away, like a boy in the first flush of infatuation, that he revealed to her what he had never revealed to anyone else before: that God had set for him a lifelong trial, and that trial was his imperfect body. 

Imagine his surprise when the girl, this bright, luminous beacon in all the grey sadness of his life, was not put out by the sailor’s revelation, not upset or even politely masking her disappointment, but _happy_. She was glad. She…she preferred her paramours thus. The sailor had not realized ladies could be inverts, but he had had his eyes opened. For the first time—the only time—our poor old sailor bared himself to a lover who looked upon all his peculiarities with hunger, and sated her hunger upon him. 

His happiness, and hers, was short-lived—she would not consent to marry him. She had what she believed to be a neat solution: that our sailor pose as his own sister, and live out his days with the girl in what would appear to others as companionate spinsterhood. It was perfect, she insisted: the sailor’s station would no longer be an impediment, and no one would suspect anything untoward of a lady and her companion.

But it was not to be borne. The sailor longed for marriage, home and hearth. He wanted to be a husband to a wife, to provide and care for her, same as any other normal man. He could not countenance submitting to the smallness of a womanhood he had never lived. Even the promise of a lifetime with his brilliant girl could not convince him to surrender the life he had forged, to have his manhood stripped from him.

_She didn’t truly see you, Francis._

The winds blew our sailor far from home again, this time to the north. The sailor felt old to his bones, old and angry at the hand God had dealt him. He grew fonder and fonder of the drink, and did not notice when it began to poison him. His gaze, ever trained to seek beauty, landed upon a most inappropriate man—a man who seemed to have all the things the sailor lacked, who seemed to breeze through an easy life. Did our sailor want him, or did he want to be him? It didn’t matter: he would have him, over and over, past the point of reasonability, past the point of, of—

* * *

James slid his chair abruptly closer to Francis’s and seized the hand that had clenched itself into a fist before it could strike the table. Francis’s color was high, his expression a thunderclap. His breath came heavily and filled the space between them with humidity.

“No more of this,” James said. “I wanted it. I wanted you. I was so mad with it I made any excuse to be near you, tried anything to get your attention. Perhaps it wasn’t the soundest decision we’ve either of us ever made, but it was ours. Mine and yours, together. No recriminations. No regrets.”

“No regrets?”

“Do you regret it?”

Francis’s ever-vexing eyes, the color of a storm, closed. He shook his head.

“Then why should I?” James said. “I _enjoy_ getting what I want, Francis. Whom I want.”

Francis looked up at him, almost defiant, and held his James’s tight against his knees. 

“Even if whom you want is a fraud?”

Francis looked very much like a kicked dog then—hopeful for a kind touch but expecting to be beaten again. James lifted Francis’s hands to his lips and kissed the ridge of his knuckles. 

“It seems, Francis, that I have a story to tell you, as well.”

James considered himself a natural storyteller—he could make nearly anything sound dashing and exciting. But now his own story, never before formed into words, stuttered out of him in halting dribs and drabs. Unlike James himself, Francis let him speak without interruption: that he was born the bastard of a fool in a place he’d been told was uncivilized all his life; that he never knew his mother, her voice, her touch, her fate; that he almost certainly wasn’t fully English; that he had clawed his way up the ranks of the navy by exploiting every connection he possibly could. 

“I’m a fake, Francis,” he said when it was all out. 

“I didn’t know any of that.”

“I’ve never said it aloud before,” James said. He forced a laugh out of his twisted mouth. “So that’s the run of it. My great, gilded life: rotten on the inside.”

Francis shook his head and clutched him by the shoulders. When James could bear to meet his eyes, he found the depths of sympathy there too painful to bear. 

“James,” Francis said firmly. “Am I meant to think the less of you for all this? I confess I do not. You’re free, don’t you see? You’re your own man.”

James’s smile trembled. He reached up to neaten Francis’s hair, and then cradled his cheek in his palm. Francis’s eyes slid shut and James pressed their foreheads together.

“You never answered my question,” James murmured.

“What question was that?”

“Would you try again, with me? As we are.”

“This is what you want?”

“Francis. I couldn’t possibly be more clear.”

“Even though I’m…”

James pulled back, pairing a smirk with a bounce of his eyebrows.

“Could be great fun,” he said. “I’ve never lain with a—” Francis’s brow snapped into its most severe angle, and James caught the word ‘woman’ before it could trip off his fool tongue. “—a brother of Caeneus before.”

“Caeneus?”

“From Ovid. You’ve not read it?”

“James.”

“I’ll see if Bridgens has a copy. It’s very diverting. Oh!” The thought occurred to him suddenly, joyfully. He seized Francis by the shoulders. “Francis! We could have children!”

Francis’s face did its finest impression of a piece of paper crumpled in a fist, and he flushed violently, but before James could sick up his own heart, Francis burst into laughter so loud it clapped between the bulkheads. 

“James!” he gasped. “I’m fifty-one years old!”

“Is that old?”

“Too old for babies, hell!”

“Oh.”

Francis sighed through the last dregs of his laughter and swiped at James’s mouth with the pad of his thumb.

“Don’t pout so,” he said. “A moment ago you’d never dreamed of children.”

“But wouldn’t they be lovely? Our fat little babies.”

Francis snorted and shook his head. 

“That time has long past,” he said. “To my great relief, I assure you.”

“I see you leave me no choice.”

Francis grew guarded again and grunted out a questioning note.

James heaved a great sigh and slumped down into his chair, flinging his arm over his eyes.

“It shall have to be I who has the babies,” he cried. “And you’ll keep a civil tongue in your head about my figure!”

Francis guffawed and knocked James’s knee with his own. A chair scraped across the floor and then James felt Francis looming over him. He dropped his arm from his face and surged up to meet Francis’s kiss. Francis tangled his hands in James’s hair and plundered his mouth. James felt drunk, sipping on Francis’s kisses. He felt seized by optimism. He could almost believe they would survive their great white walk.

Francis broke the kiss but remained propped over James, hands on James’s armrests. He peered at him as if he could see all the inner workings of his mind. His heart.

“Thank you, James,” he said quietly, and then it was James’s turn to make a sound that would have to do its best to stand in for a question. Francis stood up straight and held his hand out. James took it, and Francis, with his calloused palm and easy strength, levered him to his feet. He met his gaze without wavering and said, “For wanting everything with me.”

James held fast to Francis’s hand.

“I did my damnedest not to want too much, Francis,” he said. “But I am hopeless in my constancy.”

“I’m not certain I deserve it, but I’ll accept it gladly nonetheless.”

Relief suffused James, a diffuse heat welcome in the cool of Francis’s quarters. He gazed at Francis, drinking him in, memorizing, admiring. He wished to bask in the warmth of requited feeling, of Francis’s nearness. But, seemingly without his volition, James’s eyes lingered here or there on Francis’s face, his body, as though seeking out those places where his masculine bearing and reliable sturdiness might yield to the feminine. 

Long had James wished to see Francis bare; to be bare before him and to be held thus, tangled in a proper bed with all the time in the world and no need for haste or hiding, had been James’s most fervent, most fantastical and most preposterous wish. He had ever burned to know the particularities of Francis’s body, but he was seized now by that same desire grown tenfold, fed by a new and urgent curiosity about what strange and foreign expanses of flesh he might find beneath all of Francis’s layers.

Like a flash, James recalled Michaelangelo’s sculptures of women—as broad and lean as any of his men, with well turned muscles and squared jaws, the breasts like afterthoughts jutting boulder-like from their chests. 

“Could we—” He paused and drew a fortifying breath as Francis quirked that brow at him. “Francis, I should like to see you. If you would allow me the indulgence.”

Francis’s eyes shuttered.

“See my aberration, you mean.”

“Your singularity, Francis,” James said, clutching Francis’s hand to his chest. “Your rarity.”

Francis’s mouth twisted in a mockery of a smile and he huffed.

“Like a freakish, pitiable creature to be ogled?”

“Like an uncommon jewel,” James said. “To be cherished, Francis.”

Francis’s eyes closed, and when he opened them they were wide and bright, and he looked younger. Wordlessly he led James into his berth, snapping the curtain shut behind them and lighting a pair of lamps. He wiped at the corners of his mouth as he dragged his gaze down James’s body.

“I should like to see you, as well,” he said, voice gone rough. “You first, I think.”

James’s excitement sharpened and heated, and his prick twitched. _Calm yourself, old boy_ , he thought, and began to undo the buttons of his waistcoat. 

Francis seemed tense and nervy, nearly impatient, as James disrobed. Off came the waistcoat, the gansey, his two shirts and tunic, his boots, his belt, his trousers. His long pants. His small clothes. When at last he stood before Francis, heart racing in naught but his stockings, Francis froze, transfixed. James forced himself to be still, not to clutch at his own chest in the cold as Francis stared at him with a longing that threatened to steal the breath from his lungs. Francis reached a hand out and set it, timidly as though on the flank of a skittish colt, on the sparse patch of hair adorning the center of James’s chest, and passed his fingers through it gently.

“Have I ever seen such loveliness?” he murmured.

James’s eyes slid shut and let out a long breath. He had intended to praise most effusively whatever flesh Francis would deign to bare to him, but he had not imagined how well it would feel to have similar words turned on himself. Though he shivered in the cold, he reached out and set his fingers on the buttons of Francis’s waistcoat. He flicked his eyes up to meet Francis’s. Though his color was high and his lips were parted, he nodded sharply and James worked his way down the line of buttons. Francis shrugged the waistcoat away and slowly divested himself of the rest of his layers. Without the bulk of all his clothes, he was smaller, thinner than James would have imagined. Perhaps James was the same. Bridgens had taken in his trousers two or three times by now.

When Francis was down to his smalls and a single thin shirt, he paused, breath coming heavily. 

“I’m not—I would be unbeautiful, had I been a proper woman. I don’t want you to expect something impossible.”

James stepped closer and smoothed his hands over Francis’s shoulders. They were well broad, straight and squared, and despite the rationing and late privations, James could feel how firm they were, how hard the muscles. 

“I’ve never had my head turned by a proper woman,” he said. “Only devastatingly handsome men for me, I’m afraid.”

“I should kick out your knees for mocking me,” Francis said, even as he leaned into James’s heat. James closed his arms around him and felt the tension seep out of his body.

“You don’t have to undress for me,” he said. “I shouldn’t have asked for such a thing.”

“But you do want to see,” Francis said.

“Yes,” James said. “Who among us does not wish to see his beloved in full?”

Francis’s eyes shone up at him, full of wonder. Despite the cold, despite the strain of the circumstance, James felt the moment slow pinned by that gaze. His breath caught in his throat.

“Maybe Irving,” Francis said, and laughter burst out of James like a cannonball. He shook Francis by the shoulders, and found he was laughing as well, a low, staccato snigger that buzzed through James’s belly.

“You’re wicked, Francis,” James said, admiring. Francis cackled and stepped away. He pulled his smalls down his legs and yanked his shirt over his head, and then he was nude before James, looking down at himself.

He had flat, meager tits, barely more than a gathering of skin hanging from his chest. Each was adorned with a ripe berry of a nipple at the end, pointing toward the floor. They could hardly be called tits at all—there was no significant deviation, in James’s eye, from those of a regular man Francis’s age.

Francis was smooth all over, with a complexion like fresh cream interrupted here and there by sprays of golden freckles. When James saw more slack skin at Francis’s sunken belly, jagged with livid striations, he realized he had been expecting to see a full, taut stomach. More fool he, to think Francis unaffected by all that had befallen them. It was plain to see that hunger gnawed at him, same as it did James.

Curls of pale hair sprouted some inches below Francis’s navel and then thickened into a bush that was at once sprawling and sparse. James caught sight of indistinct flesh at the apex of Francis’s thighs, but there was nothing much to see and he didn’t want to stare. Said thighs were powerful, thick and corded, crowned with freckles. Before he could lose himself in a daydream, James’s eye drew down further and found pink knees, hairy legs, and wide feet still in stockings. 

“These were once a blight upon my person,” Francis said, gesturing to the tits. “I suppose even time and misfortune have their benefits; they deflated after my ordeal and have been wasting away ever since. You’d laugh if you saw the way I used to have to strap them down.”

James stretched out one finger and pressed the tip into a nipple. It was large as a pebble, easily thrice the size of James’s, and hard and tight in the cold. James marveled at the contrast between his own olive complexion against Francis’s clotted cream. A glance upward revealed Francis giving him a flat-lipped look. James snatched his hand away.

“Is it hideous?” Francis said. 

“ _Hideous?_ ” James exclaimed. “Francis, it’s— _you _are remarkable!”__

__The eyebrow winged up to its most disbelieving angle._ _

__“Look at you!” James cried. “Look at all you’ve accomplished—a captain of the Royal Navy! An explorer, a scientist, a man who’s been places other men with smaller minds and smaller lives have never dreamed! All on your own terms. All without a whisper of suspicion against your manhood, despite everything stacked against you. It’s not just remarkable, Francis, it’s extraordinary!”_ _

__Francis blinked at him, seemingly struck dumb. James couldn’t read whatever emotion troubled his face. A tremor rolled through James—he couldn’t hold back the shivering any longer. Francis roused himself from his daze and leaned into his berth to pluck up a blanket. He swept James up into its softness and bore him down into the cot. James shook the blanket out to cover Francis as well. They lay side by side, cramped up together, breathing each other’s air, sopping up each other’s warmth. James’s eyes were fixed on Francis’s. Peace and wonder settled over him. His hand had landed on Francis’s hip; he stroked the skin there with the pad of his thumb. It was unfathomably soft._ _

__“Francis?”_ _

__“Hm.”_ _

__“May I venture an impertinent question?”_ _

__Half of Francis’s mouth lifted in a lazy smirk._ _

__“Let us say that for tonight, you may ask whatever you will, and I shall endeavor to answer without pique.”_ _

__“And if offense is caused?”_ _

__“Then I shall be intractable, but you’re accustomed to that.”_ _

__James laughed. Loath though he was to leave the perfect handle of Francis’s hip, he was drawn to push back the lock of hair that had fallen across his brow, and to trace the bones of his face: the orbit of his eye, the crest of a cheekbone, the gentle line of his jaw. There was scant, soft hair there, near invisible but clear to see close up. A few thicker hairs had sprouted along his chin and above his lip; they were blunted as if frequently shaved away by an attentive steward._ _

__“What did you not like about being a girl?”_ _

__Francis rumbled out an indistinct sound, but his expression remained serene. It was all silence for several long moments, and then Francis drew a deep breath._ _

__“I’m not certain liking or disliking anything in particular is on balance in this equation,” he said. “Of course there are the nauseating trappings of girlhood I could not help but despise—the clothes, the difference in chores divided between the boys and girls, the lack of education, the expectation that a girlchild, no matter how ungainly and unmaternal, will help care for babies in preparation for having her own. In this way, every girl is a bird with clipped wings. Many women object to these social shackles with varying degrees of radicality—and yet they do not reject their sex. Girlhood, womanhood, therefore, springs from a deeper well. It is something more foundational, something metaphysical—something never revealed to me. I kept waiting not only to understand my girlhood, but to be at ease with it, and I never was. That’s the true core of your question. What makes a woman a woman, and why am I missing it?”_ _

__James grunted. Francis’s mind was analytic, often to a fault. He so rarely philosophized that James now wondered how many tortured hours Francis had spent, whiling away at the same question._ _

__“The answer is I do not know,” Francis said. “Was it simply because I did not want to be called girl? Was it simply because I did not wish to spend my life sewing and cleaning and wrangling babies, being some man’s broodmare until my awful body became an awful grave? Was it the nuisance of the hair, or the call of the sea, or the way I loved the girl down the road too well? Who can say? All I know is that when I stepped on my first ship with my hair cropped close to my scalp and my brother’s clothes on this ruinous body, when I said _my name is Francis Crozier_ , it was akin to a prisoner stepping outside for the first time. I could breathe of the good clean air. I could feel the sun on my face. If girlhood was an ill-fitting brace, boyhood offered me wings.” _ _

__Francis’s eyes, which had gone unfocused as if looking through James in his reverie, snapped back to meet James’s gaze._ _

__“How did you know you were a boy?” Francis asked. There was no snide tone, no pointed condescension—just the question, and the eyes._ _

__Once, when James was hardly past the age of reason, he had stolen into his aunt’s rooms when she and Uncle Robert were calling on neighbors. He had donned one of her skirts, and then made a mess of himself at the vanity—rouge and shadows and lip paints. He was found by the housekeeper, who boxed his ears and handed him off to the groundskeeper for a thrashing. His aunt and uncle never mentioned it, and the housekeeper locked up Louisa’s rooms when she was out from then on. James wouldn’t try on another dress for many years, but he could recall it vividly even now: the soft, delicate lace, the swathes of green silk gathered around his hips, his thighs, his legs, the muslin on his skin._ _

__“I don’t know,” James said._ _

__“That’s the right of it, I think,” Francis said. “We’re not meant to dwell on such things at all. We’re meant to go merrily along, never questioning how God made us.”_ _

__“God gave us dirty great brains and a great deal of time to think,” James said, and Francis smiled. James trailed his hand down Francis’s body and the smile faded, lips parting as his breath came faster. When James cupped the pouch of skin that could be called a breast, Francis trembled, his eyes fluttering shut. James made to pull his hand away, but Francis clapped his own hand to James’s, trapping it against his chest. James rested his forehead against Francis’s. “Francis?”_ _

__He hummed but didn’t open his eyes. James could feel the steady thud of his heartbeat against his palm._ _

__“Your body isn’t a ruin,” James said. Francis dragged in a shaky breath and let it shudder out of him. “I confess I find it a marvel, and I thank you for allowing me the pleasure of seeing it.”_ _

__Francis pressed closer, until they were belly to belly, Francis’s thick thigh slung over James’s hip. He swept James’s lips into a kiss that ravaged all thought from James’s mind. James reveled in the way Francis’s weight bore down upon him exactly as he’d wanted for so long—the relief of having where once he had only burned with longing nearly made him moan. He allowed his hands to roam the smooth expanse of Francis’s back, his hips, his arse. He parted the cheeks and dragged his fingers down Francis’s crevice until he found a familiar furrow radiating so much heat. He did moan then, directly into Francis’s mouth, and Francis moaned back, pressing his arse into the contact even as he ground his front against James’s pelvis. James’s prick wept for some consideration, but James’s mind was caught on something else._ _

__He pulled back from their embrace, panting. Dazed, Francis propped himself up over him and peered at him through half-lidded eyes._ _

__“Show me how to touch you,” James said, voice ragged. “Tell me—tell me the secret of the sailor and his wicked tongue.”_ _

__Francis threw his head back and laughed. James had never seen anything so beautiful._ _

__Francis guided him through his first ventures below the hip; he allowed James to peer at him wonderingly with a lantern, showed him the little prick he had buried in hair, sitting like a crown atop lush mounds of flesh. James knew the mechanics of the thing, but was awed to find he could see _inside_ Francis, and that doing so with such delight enflamed them both. Francis’s curious genitals became flushed as James explored, the nub of his prick grew engorged and obvious, and his passage began to glisten, clenching and unclenching as if seeking succor until the slick dribbled out of him. James was surprised to find he recognized the scent of it from their previous couplings, and his own prick filled further. _ _

__James set the lantern aside and, borne down by his frequent thoughts of stretching his jaw around Francis’s cock, he bent over Francis’s lap and set to pleasing him._ _

__Francis clutched at a nipple with one hand and James’s hair with the other as he taught James how he liked his prick sucked: slow and rhythmic without letting the head peek from the foreskin, occasionally dragging the flat of his tongue back and forth over the covered tip until Francis needed a harder, faster drilling. He tasted, James thought in a state of lustful intoxication, so like the sea._ _

__James gave himself over to Francis’s need. For countless minutes, Francis bucked and writhed into James’s mouth, stomach heaving against James’s forehead. When he couldn’t stand it any longer, James reached between his own legs to yank mercilessly at his prick. Francis was gasping and squirming and swearing until finally he said, “James, James, put your fingers in, now now now.”_ _

__Three of James’s fingers sank inside Francis’s cunny without any coaxing, and James was shocked to find it clutched at him tight and muscular despite the fluid that flowed out of him at the touch. Francis muffled a shout but kicked the bulkhead and held tight to James’s head as his hips snapped up. Breathlessly he commanded James to beckon his fingers inside him; when James obliged there was another choked off gasp, another flood of liquid. James worked his tongue faster and firmer, slurped at Francis’s slick with heady abandon, and fucked that remarkable cunt until his arm, his wrist, were burning with the effort._ _

__Francis tensed up around him and appeared to be gasping for breath and then holding it by turns, until with a grunt and a wrench of James’s hair, his thighs locked around James’s head and he came apart around him, his tremors more akin to earthquakes than delicate shivering. James boggled at the way Francis’s cunt squeezed at him like a rolling wave crashing over and over. Slick dripped down his wrist._ _

__Finally, Francis pushed James’s head away and manhandled him easily into the position he had so recently occupied. Francis swallowed his cock and James’s vision whited out. His shout reverberated between the bulkheads, but he could not find it in him to give a care. Francis was a thorough and enthusiastic cocksucker, and James spared a fleeting thought to wonder why he’d never had the pleasure before, but then Francis was circling and breaching his arsehole with a greased finger, and James lost all thoughts but one: _that’s his own slick he’s putting in me_. James’s rapture tightened and sharpened and then soared, and breathless he pumped his ecstasy into Francis’s ravenous mouth._ _

__Afterward, Francis maneuvered them under the blankets so he lay with his chest pressed up against James’s back, his knees tucked into the back of James’s, his arm slung over James’s chest, his nose in James’s hair. He clutched James tightly to his body, and James felt a great release of all his earthly concerns._ _

__“Was it pleasing to you, James?” Francis asked, breaking the twilight sleep into which James had dozed. Francis’s voice did not waver, but James caught the thread of uncertainty nonetheless. His heart ached for Francis—for a man who had spent his life hiding, as surely as James had. He ached for the men they had been, hiding from each other. He squeezed Francis’s hand to his chest. Could Francis feel his heartbeat? Did it match his own?_ _

__“I have never been so pleased in all my riotous life,” James said. “Never so pleased, nor so happy.”_ _

__Francis tucked his face into James’s back and held him tight. James could feel him shuddering. James stroked his arms and spared no thoughts for morning._ _


	4. Chapter 4

The men were sick and weary. James felt it as well; his bones ached, and his skin felt as though it were tearing apart at seams he didn’t know he had. Still, when they made camp on a good swath of land, James volunteered to lead one of the hunting parties. He had the urge to shoot something.

His party included Royal Marines Paterson and Hopcraft, as well as ABs Hartnell and Coombs. Every day, they trudged across frosted land, squinting against the sun and finding no evidence of game. Every night, they all of them piled tight into a single tent to preserve heat, and James quietly missed Francis. He felt like a silly girl in the first throes of infatuation, mooning after some well-turned lad with kind eyes and a wicked grin. _Buck up,_ he chastised himself. They would be back at camp in but a handful of days. Even without a kill slung across their sledge, Francis would welcome him home with a smile, a steaming cup of tea, and later, the hot grip of his arsehole.

James felt lucky for it, even now.

James was wedged between Hopcraft and Hartnell, poking listlessly at a tin of questionable veal tomato when the men began their nightly game: what’s the first thing you’ll do when we’re back in England? 

Thus far, most of their musings had focused on the meals they would eat, with increasingly elaborate detail and far-fetched extravagances. James had had occasion to tell them of the best things he’d ever eaten in all his travels, which devolved then into tales of the oddest things he’d ever eaten in said travels. A curious tendril of shame wound about his lungs when the men snickered at the thought of this or that strange food from China, India, Singapore. What wouldn’t James—what wouldn’t any of them—give to be eating the fourth stomach of a cow or the stone oven-cooked colon of a boar right now, as his body wasted away on all this ice?

But tonight, conversation turned, perhaps inevitably, to women. 

“I told my mum I’d bring her something from the Sandwich Islands,” Paterson said. “Now I’ve nothing to give her.”

“Just give her a great big hunk of ice, Corporal,” Hartnell said, and titters of laughter rumbled through the tent.

“ _I_ have something to give your mum,” Hopcraft said. The laughter grew as Paterson shoved Hopcraft, and the force of it bumped down the circle of men, rattling James’s teeth. It was good though, laughing. James couldn’t be bothered to hold to rank here, couldn’t be bothered to dampen any mirth his men might find it in them to scrape up.

Opposite James, Coombs sighed.

“I’m going to roll my wife into bed and not let her up for a week,” he said. 

“Lor!” Hartnell said. “I’ve near forgot what a woman feels like.”

“It’s a room I’ll let on Granby Street first thing, lads,” Hopcraft said. “Three of your prettiest girls, madame, and don’t keep me waiting.”

“ _Three!_ ” Paterson exclaimed. “Come off it, Robbie—your pisser’s gone so soft these days you can hardly find it to give it a tug. What are three slags meant to do, sing to it?”

“Oi!”

“What about you, Captain?” Hartnell piped up over the din. “You got a sweetheart back home?”

James’s mind strayed to Francis, the only sweetheart he’d ever had. Would he object to being called as such? James didn’t think so—but James was not a delicate woman any man would be glad to have on his arm. James was no one Francis would ever be able to acknowledge as his. His heart gave a pang, but he put on his best face and played at nonchalance.

“I confess I never much saw the point,” he said. “I’ve spent all my days buffeted from one corner of the earth to the next—better not to be encumbered by such things.”

“Ah,” Coombs said sagely. “Married to the sea.”

James huffed out a laugh. He imagined Francis in his uniform on the deck of some unsinkable ship, the waves crashing and roiling behind him as he stood tall, steady and defiant as the wind whipped all around him. In his mind, Francis held out his hand, and James took it. 

“Yes,” James said. “A bit of a cliché, I’m afraid.”

“Some seafaring men are like that though, yeah?” Hartnell said. “Like Captain Crozier. It’s as it should be. What would the navy do without them?”

James made himself laugh again, and the conversation moved on to sweethearts past and baudy exploits at various docks around the world and even to contagions of the genitals, which all these upstanding men had only heard about, not suffered, of course. James sank into his own thoughts as he spooned meat sludge into his mouth. 

When he thought of his future now, Francis was ever beside him, whether his imagination spooled out a comfortable England or a new ship, a new commission, a new country. But his thoughts had taken on the dream-like shine of unreality—in truth, the vast empty whiteness was so consuming that his hopes of an enduring togetherness with Francis began to feel like heaven. Like something he could rest his head on after the tundra took him to meet God.

James bit down on something too hard. Pain bloomed through his head and the taste of iron flooded his tongue. He choked and swore, and the conversation died abruptly. Hartnell laid a hand on James’s shoulder.

“All right, sir?” he asked.

James fished the offending detritus from his mouth. The usual bit of metal—and a single broken tooth, caked in blood and tissue. 

The hole it left in his gums bled and bled. It would not stop bleeding. 

James and his hunting party returned empty handed three days later. James placed all his gear where it belonged and made his way to the tent he shared with Francis, forcing himself into a sedate stride. As he passed the command tent whose flaps were tied shut, he heard the low music of Francis’s voice, the words indistinct. James paused and peered through the ties. 

Francis was sat at the table before a tiny mirror, and Jopson stood behind him, one hand steadying Francis’s head against his own stomach and the other gliding a razor over the sparse whiskers that grew over Francis’s lip and chin. 

“These are growing in rather magnificently,” Jopson said.

Francis grunted.

“You are flattering them beyond their station,” Francis said. “Still, it seems a shame to shave them away when I worked so hard to get them.”

Jopson’s smile was lopsided in his attempt to tamp it down. Christ—did he know the truth of Francis’s body? James’s heart swooped low when he realized he had never considered it before, but surely a steadfast and implacable steward, one who had been with Francis since the Antarctic and seen him through his illness with nary a crack in his expression, knew all the ins and outs of him. Perhaps better than James.

“Your hair could use a trim as well, sir,” Jopson said, and _stroked_ through the fringe now falling into Francis’s eyes. James had little energy for indignation, but his heart ached at what he was seeing and he could not name a reason.

“And yours is near long enough for pigtails,” Francis said.

“Wouldn’t my mum be proud?”

“That does it,” Francis said, slapping his knee. “You in this seat next, Thomas, and me with the shears in my hand.”

Jopson hummed out a laugh.

“I’m not certain I trust your sense of style, sir,” he said. “A task for Mr. Bridgens, I think.”

“I see how it is,” Francis grumbled, but he was smiling so well the gap in his teeth showed and his eyes were sparkling away. Jopson flicked away the last of his whiskers, and Francis wiped the shaving cream from his face. The shears came out, and Jopson tipped Francis’s head forward to start an easy trim in the back. “Go on then,” Francis continued, muffled. “What’s the word?”

The affable smile faded from Jopson’s face.

“More sick men than well men now, sir,” he said. Francis grunted an agreeing note. “Lieutenants Hodgson and Irving expressed doubt about the possibility of finding game. Squabbles are breaking out amongst the men—small enough disagreements, but these things erode morale and break trust now we need it most. There is little hope we will reach Fort Resolution.”

It was true that there was no way without game. Hope evaporated and left James so heavy he felt he might sink into the earth, same as Caeneus.

“And your tent, Thomas?” Francis said. Gone was the jocular gruffness; in its place was only an unbearable kindness, exactly the thing that had broken James’s heart open to let the man muscle his way inside.

Jopson swiped at the hair on his forehead.

“We sleep all in a pile, sir,” Jopson said. “Gibson is ailing, and Hoar is ruled by his fears. They—clutch, sir. In the night.”

“Thomas…”

“It’s no bother, sir, truly.”

“Come stay in ours, Thomas,” Francis said. “I promise you, James is safe. You’d have nothing to worry over.”

“I couldn’t intrude, sir.”

“For God’s sake, Thomas, it’s not an intrusion if I invite you!”

“Captain,” Jopson said, pairing a small smile with a shake of his head. “Think of the impropriety.”

“No one would begrudge a captain his steward, Thomas, I assure you.”

“Then think of Captain Fitzjames, and how disappointed he’ll be when he finds I’ve arranged my bedroll directly beside him in your tent.”

Francis lifted his head enough to meet Jopson’s eye in the mirror, all jocularity vanished.

“Thomas, what’s a bit of slap and tickle against your safety?”

James stepped back then, and padded away as quietly as he could. A lump rose in his throat. He had confessed love whilst Francis so easily proclaimed him nothing but a good fuck. Meanwhile Jopson knew Francis far more intimately than James could ever dream: Francis and Jopson were the same manner of man. They were two kindred spirits and James was nothing. Monstrous. A nameless bastard and a fraud and a failure of a man. 

He trudged away, resolving to find Dundy and his tucked away bottle of brandy.

Francis attempted to catch his eye all afternoon and evening, but James neatly sidestepped him at every turn. He didn’t get proper sozzled on Dundy’s store—he partook only enough to grow maudlin and broody, sinking into his pique. Dundy was sharing a tent with all the other lieutenants, and there was not room enough for James as well, but still he hid himself away in their company until Francis poked his head inside and pinned him with that disapproving brow.

“Captain Fitzjames,” he said. The burr of displeasure in his voice sparked something low in James’s gut, because he was a perverse deviant of the highest order. “I would have your full report on our prospects for game, and the lieutenants would have their tent back.”

“Up you get,” Dundy murmured into his ear. He slapped James on the back and James got to his feet. He brushed past Francis on the way out and stalked off to their tent without a care to the way Francis rocked back, expression pinched.

In the tent, James set to readying himself for bed whilst pointedly not looking at Francis. When at last he bundled himself up fully dressed in his own sack, far from Francis with his back turned, Francis blew up.

“For God’s sake!” he said. “Speak your grievance and be done with it!”

“I’ve nothing to say,” James said.

“You are _drunk_ ,” Francis said, “and you’ve never had nothing to say in all your life!”

“I am no such thing!”

He heard Francis sigh, and he listened to him grapple about getting into his sack, which had parted from James’s for the first time since leaving the ships. There was more rustling and then James could feel the bulk of him, the heat of him, budging up against his back.

In a low voice, Francis said, “I missed you.”

“Did you?” James said. “I confess it seemed you had no thought for me at all, beyond my utility at providing a good knee-trembler.”

“What? What does that mean?”

“To my eyes you looked quite contented in Jopson’s company.”

“Jopson? What are you on about?”

“Perhaps it is not too late for me to switch places with him now.”

“James, for God’s sake, look at me. Stop this and look at me.”

Francis’s voice tore at James’s heart. Begrudgingly he turned around, but shut his eyes lest he be obliged to look into Francis’s. Francis murmured his name, and a warm touch ghosted across his cheek. James squeezed his eyes shut tighter.

“Don’t be this way,” Francis murmured. “Tell me how I’ve stepped in it and we’ll put it to rights.”

James pinched his lips together and shook his head. Distantly, he was aware of how perfectly ridiculous he was being— _like a spurned girl flinging herself from fainting couch to fainting couch_ , a dark voice supplied—but he could no more stop it than he could transport the remainder of this expedition to a temperate paradise with a snap of his fingers. 

“You overheard me with Jopson earlier, was that it?” Francis said. “When he was shaving me?”

James grunted.

“You can’t imagine I would take advantage of my steward in such a way, so what is it, hmm?”

James cracked one eye, and then the other. Francis looked only fond, and ever so dear, damn him. James schooled his face into a scowl.

“You and Jopson understand each other,” he said. “Who could compare?”

Francis grew pensive. His mouth turned down. 

“You won’t tell anyone,” he said.

“Francis!”

“It’s not safe, James,” Francis said. “For men like Jopson and me—I have to be sure.”

“Of course not!” James hissed. “Christ, Francis, am I really nothing but a convenient prick and a gossip hound to you?”

“Who said any of these things! All this wild conjecture, James, and I’ve done nothing to deserve it!”

“You! You bloody well said them! _what’s a bit of slap and tickle next to you_ you said, I heard you, Francis!”

“Jesus Christ,” Francis said. “You heard me, but do you hear yourself? Of course you and I would set aside our, our _congress_ to make sure Thomas’s secret was secure! Do you have any idea the _danger_ , James, the mortal bloody peril he would be in should one of those groping shits nestle too closely to something they shouldn’t?”

James, who had been gathering a great head of steam he fancied letting blow quite spectacularly, paused and held his breath. His mind unspooled a wild thread—Jopson, discovered and stripped, cast out into snow and ice, jeered at, kicked, and worse. Of course worse. There were always worse things that happened to women who transgressed, and those things had every possibility of happening to Jopson.

To Francis.

James’s breath left him all at once in a shaky stream. 

“Oh.”

“ _Oh_ ,” Francis echoed. Nonetheless he inched closer to James, laid a hand on his jaw. “I have not been plain, I think,” he said. “I love you, James. I love you madly and recklessly. I love you so well I thought my heart would fall out of my chest this past week without you. There’s none other for me.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t look like that,” Francis said, and sealed his mouth over James’s. James let him in—opened his mouth and dragged him in. He pulled him over his body but found two sleep sacks and all their clothes in the way. 

They divested themselves of all that stood between their two skins and swallowed down all sounds that issued from the depths of their feeling. Francis clambered atop him, blanket draped over his back, and sank his cunt down James’s prick until he was seated fully inside, Francis’s knees bracketing James’s hips. It was wet inside, with a strange, soft, rippling grip unlike that of an arsehole, but James’s eyes rolled back nonetheless and he bucked up into Francis’s cunt. Francis inhaled sharply, and James pulled him down to take his breath into his own lungs. 

Francis had confided in James that he preferred a prick in his arse to one in his cunny, but had scant experience in tickling said cunny but for Miss Cracroft. He and James would have to put it to the test, he had said with a twinkle in his eye. Regardless, they had done this so few times that James was still developing an opinion on the entire endeavor, though he knew he enjoyed pleasing Francis with his mouth and fingers, and found the flood of slick he could inspire rather intoxicating. Regardless of the how, James was glad simply to be allowed inside at all—glad to be touched, glad to be desired, glad to feel Francis all around him, strong and lashed with muscle, trembling with pleasure. 

James ventured a suck at one of the nipples teasing his face, and Francis sighed most gratifyingly. James sucked harder and felt Francis tighten around him and then grind down into his pelvis. James raised his legs to give Francis something to brace himself against, and then Francis was riding him hard and steady, and James could do nothing but give himself over to him wholly and completely. His hands roamed over Francis’s back, his arse, his tits and his belly. With some effort he inserted his hand between them such that he could fondle Francis’s prick between two knuckles. Francis’s pace grew more insistent. He muttered James’s name like a plea. James planted his feet more firmly and began to fuck up into Francis hard and fast. Francis threw his head back and choked down the sounds of his rapture. 

Francis’s rhythm stuttered and he tensed over James. Even in the dark, even with the dips and drags of slack skin over hard muscle, the sun spots and the pock marks, he was magnificent. A god of old writhing his glory over James’s mere mortal body. Suddenly Francis stilled and held his breath, cunt strangling James’s cock. James felt a stream of liquid spurt forth, and then Francis was gasping, shuddering and collapsing onto him. 

James maneuvered Francis onto his back and kissed him deep and savoring. Francis locked his arms around James’s back and held him tight as James fucked him with rapid snaps of his hips. James muffled more grunts and bellows, and Francis somehow grew only slicker, squeezed him tighter, rippled over and over around his prick. When Francis was sensate enough to slide a hand down James’s arse and rub at his hole, James’s vision was dashed from his eyes and he spent seemingly endlessly into Francis’s cunt. 

When he returned to the earthy plane, he found he was curled on his side with one hand cupping the skin at Francis’s belly and his head resting on Francis’s spare little skin-tits. Francis was carding idly through his hair. James turned his head enough to kiss Francis’s clavicle. He made to stroke his hand up Francis’s body and onto the tits he found he liked so well, but Francis clapped his free hand on James’s and held it there against his stomach.

“I’ve another story to tell you, if you’ve an ear to hear it,” he said. 

“Always,” James said. 

Silence reigned for so long, James wondered if Francis had fallen asleep, but his heart never slowed in James’s ear, and James contented himself with listening to it. At last, Francis took a breath and began to speak. 

“After the _Fury_ sank and we returned to England, I was promoted to lieutenant. Captain Parry was going to make another run at the passage in a year, and I joined up eagerly. In the meantime, I was at loose ends and hardly knew what to do with myself on dry land. I celebrated in the way to which I had become accustomed—I imbibed freely and took my carnal pleasures where I could.

“Perhaps you’ve guessed at it, but some months after our return, I found myself listless with illness, and quite unable to shake it. My courses had stopped, but being at sea meant the damned things were unpredictable at the best of times, so I remained ignorant as to my ailment until it was quite too late to remedy it in those ways women have for all of human history. It was too late to do anything but see it through.”

James popped up and looked down at Francis. Francis looked hunted, but met his eyes defiantly nonetheless.

“You were with child,” James said. Francis closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them again he nodded.

“It is quite a grotesquery, to wake up one day having swallowed a boulder, tits swollen out to here—” He gestured sharply outside himself. “—and no earthly idea as to when you’d let a prick into the quim you thought you’d kept untouched all your misshapen life.”

“Don’t speak that way,” James chided softly. Francis’s hair, freshly cut, fell no longer into his eyes, but James brushed it away nonetheless. Francis looked up at him with a wondering expression, as if he could not bear the tenderness of his treatment at James’s hand. “You are so unkind to yourself, Francis.”

“I was a fool playing a fool’s game that could have got me killed.”

“You were a man, who wanted those things men want,” James said. “Who could fault you for them?”

Francis searched his face, brows knitting down even as a smile curved his lips.

“Do you honestly believe that?”

_Any reasonable man would_ , James wanted to say, even as he knew it to be false. There were too many men who made the concerns of others their own, and rushed to heap judgement upon them. Sometimes unto their doom.

“What did you do when you realized?” he said instead.

Francis heaved a great sigh. He pinned his eyes to the ceiling, but James remained propped up, gazing down at him as he spoke.

“I needed help I had no means of finding in London. I could not go to James—Sir James Ross. I could not go to Blanky. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I believe Thomas and his wife would have been a fine choice, but at the time there seemed nothing I could do but return to my family. I chose a sister I had been close with and wrote to her. Margaret. Maggie. She was just a year my junior, and we had come up together. Though she wouldn’t get the hang of my name until years later, she understood me. She knew me. When it was clear I was her brother rather than her sister, she was the only one among the dirty great lot of them who didn’t behave as though I’d beheaded the Mother Superior in the town square.

“Mag had married a man named Crawford who was some manner of book keeper in Belfast. They had three children at the time, and he worked long hours. He was a soft sort of man, doted on her and the weans, and she could do near anything and he’d still look at her as if the sun shone out her arse. So to her I went. She had a thousand things to say about my condition and no mistake, but she was quick with a plan: I was lucky to have caught her between children, and thus she would make a show of having fallen pregnant again. Crawford would know the truth of it, but he was harmless with Mag’s collar on him, so to speak.

“I despised the state of being with child. To say I felt alien to my own body would be an understatement—I was as a ship besieged by pirates. I was largely idle but for some light housework and tending the modest batch of crops Mag had in her garden, and thus had all the time in the world to sink into the sheer horror of it. My body, already a battlefield, had betrayed me in the most elemental way. It reminded me daily, hourly, that I was not a true man—that I never had been and never would be. I could not look in the mirror, I could not keep my eyes open when I washed, I could not bear to look down and see what my foolishness had wrought. If I could have divorced mind from body then I would have. If I could have possessed any passing bird with my spirit so as to catch the nearest wind and fling me far away from myself, I would have.”

“Oh, Francis.”

“When the time came, the pain was vast and all-consuming. I cannot describe it in such a way as you’d understand but that I felt torn asunder, split in twain, doubled and halved again and again. I am astonished that anyone, even a proper woman, would do it at all, much less more than once. It was unbearable. An intolerable end to an intolerable ordeal.”

James gripped his hand.

“The babe was a girl,” Francis went on, squeezing James’s hand. “Maggie set her in my arms to give me a wee look at her, and she was rather repulsive, like a red, squashed, hairless monkey. I did not wish to hold her, to name her, to feed her. I did not wish to do anything but take myself far away now that I was quit of her. A coward’s impulse, perhaps, but in this I had no tatters of bravery left.

“Maggie named her Moira against my best wishes. I stayed the month or two it took to heal and let my tits dry up, and then I was off again to the Arctic, now a lieutenant. I resolved not to disgrace my rank with an ill-advised ship’s liaison and any chance at another ordeal, and thus I wouldn’t have a man again until you.”

Francis looked at him then, cautious, expecting some judgement James had no capacity to pass. 

“I am given to understand,” Francis said slowly, “that Moira grew out of the simian state and into a perfectly normal looking young woman.”

“You’ve never met her?”

Francis sighed again and looked away.

“My mother died in ’38,” he said. “Somehow it fell to me to make the arrangements, particularly for the care of my two elder spinster sisters. I went back to Ireland and saw the whole clan. Since Da was already years dead, and I a famous sailor always dashing about on all manner of sensational expeditions they’d read about in the papers, the rest of them behaved as though nothing was amiss, as though they had never mistreated me all my forty-some years of life, as though I had been embraced as their brother all along.” Francis shook his head and scoffed. “I was too worn out and grief-stung to object, and simply allowed myself the brief succor of their esteem. 

“It was at Mam’s funeral that I met Moira, along with all the rest of Maggie’s children. She was eleven years old. Violently freckled. Hair like the last dregs of sunset, eyes green as the hills. A lovely wee thing. Can’t imagine how she came out of the likes of me, and glad she is ignorant of the connection.”

James hushed him again, hand through his hair. Francis’s eyes fluttered shut at the touch. 

“It is my worst sin, I think, to feel nothing for her,” Francis said in a whisper. “To feel more for Jopson, with whom I share an unspeakable affliction and a love of the sea, than I do the child of my flesh. This, I imagine, is how a father is meant to feel.”

James stroked over Francis’s knuckles.

“You expect me to excoriate you for your imagined failings but Francis, I will not.”

“A year ago you would have had no such compunction against it.”

“A year ago you were a different man. As you were twenty years ago, when all this happened.”

“I abandoned my child as surely as your father abandoned you.”

“You’re very determined to earn my condemnation, aren’t you? I tell you, Francis, I will not give it to you.”

“I left her—”

“With _family_ , Francis,” James said, thumping their joined hands on Francis’s chest. “You left her with people who loved her, people who loved _you_. You left her with a name and a place in the world and a life free of the yoke of bastardy. You took care of her best you could, even as you insisted you felt nothing for her, and I would lay all my worldly goods on a bet that you send money to your sister for her upkeep and receive letters of her latest exploits in return. The circumstances are not the same, Francis, and I’ll not hear otherwise.”

Francis was silent, but held fast to his hand. James leaned down and pressed a kiss on his brow, on his cheek, on his lips. He pulled away and began to dress.

“Where are you going,” Francis said.

“To fetch your steward,” he said. “His captain has need of him, and will from now on, I imagine.”

“James.”

James turned and found Francis sitting up, bare to the night air but eyes full of gratitude. James couldn’t resist ducking down again and stealing one last kiss. 

There was no game, no matter how many parties they sent out, no matter the direction in which they trekked. Francis’s eyes lingered contemplatively on Lady Silence whenever she—and Goodsir, for he was never far from her now—were near. John Morfin was driven mad by a relentless pain James could only dread was coming for the rest of them. The men grew more and more unwell, and though his progress was slow, James ailed steadily along with them. They were unable to move camp.

Jopson, at least, received a field promotion, and James saw smiles around the command table for the first time since before Sir John passed. 

James told Francis he had scurvy on a morning’s walk around the perimeter of the camp. Francis stopped trudging along and turned to James, grasping him by the shoulders.

“We’ll not be defeated by this,” he said. “Do you hear me? I’m going to get you clear, James.”

James, like a zealot, believed him.

It was Irving, however, who delivered them a family of Netsilik. Irving with tears in his eyes and seal on his tongue like ambrosia. Irving who had managed to make friends with someone with whom he could not speak, and led his new friends to the camp of dying men. 

The Netsilik family greeted the Lady Silence with great enthusiasm. For her part, James had never seen her smile at all, much less with such unbridled happiness. After this reunion, the family were generous with their catch, and in conversation with Francis and Blanky, offered to catch more. They also offered to stay and feed the camp until all the men were well enough to join them at their own. Their people, they said, would tend the sick and provide yet more food, better shelter, better blankets and clothing, for as long as it was necessary. James could not parse the particulars of the conversation but for what Francis and Blanky sporadically translated, but he could see an uncommon brightness in Francis’s eyes, as that of unshed tears. 

That evening, as Blanky performed a shadow puppet pantomime for the little girl and the men nearly wept over their portions of seal meat, Francis held a command meeting. 

“We will join the Netsilik camp,” he said. “There will be men among our number who hesitate to do so even as they partake of Alootook’s generosity. It is up to us not only to convince them of the necessity, but to prevent any of them from causing offense. We will be gracious, we will be thankful, is that clear?”

A chorus of _yes, sir_ s rose up around the table. Francis was at ease and confident, sitting up tall and straight with his shoulders squared. He looked every inch the captain James had believed Sir John to be. James felt a rush of tenderness for his first, and it drowned out the old grief of Sir John’s death, and the disappointment James could at last admit the man inspired in him. 

“Furthermore,” Francis continued, “after we have regained our strength in the Netsilik camp, each man must find a way to make himself useful to them. This will be difficult, as they are experts in surviving these conditions while we are worse than bumbling children, but we must not be idle. We will learn to hunt, we will learn to skin animals, we will learn to build houses and fashion weapons and sew clothing if we must; we cannot be a burden to them.”

“Hear hear,” James said, and all of the lieutenants nodded along save one. Francis looked at Little with his brow hiked high.

“What troubles you, Edward?” he asked.

“You speak as though we will be with them for the rest of our lives,” Little said. His perpetually woebegone expression had taken on a pinched quality. “Is that what we’re meant to expect, sir? Is that what we should be preparing the men for?” 

Francis shifted in his seat and drew in a slow breath. He laced his fingers together and planted the resultant fist on the table before himself.

“We have nothing to gain from giving the men some kind of timeline of which there can be no guarantees,” he said. “Nor will it serve them well to believe, at this juncture, that they will never see home again. For now it is only this: we are taking sanctuary with the Netsilik people.”

Little’s mouth trembled, but he nodded. Francis reached a hand across the table and squeezed him on the arm.

“If you’re asking my unvarnished opinion, Edward, then I will give it: I do not believe we can expect _Terror_ to sail again—once we are ensconced among the Netsilik and well enough for the journey, we will send for the men we left behind. I also believe that should rescue come from England, it will be some time, perhaps years, before it reaches us. We must indeed prepare for an indefinite stay with the Netsilik.”

Little nodded, Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed whatever it was he could not say. Francis patted his arm and withdrew again, casting his gaze around the table.

“Gentlemen,” he said. “I hope you all realize how fortunate we are.”

James met Francis’s eyes as the murmurs of agreement rose up around the table. Francis gave him a soft smile, and James felt the bite of the cold ebb inexorably away.


End file.
